Technical capability is often what you need to get you into Defence, and once you’re in, the need to stay on top of your product, the market, your customers, emerging trends and changing political landscapes never goes away, indeed it intensifies.
As you become more embedded the demands on your dollars and your hours increase too, whether it’s for assurance, cyber-security, physical security, managing an appropriately skilled and cleared workforce as well as all the other day-to-day demands.
Quite rightly, the things that directly affect the customer tend to get priority.
Defence has for some years now been openly talking about building sovereign capability, and ODIS material has explicitly described commercial fragility as a supply-chain risk.
This means Defence (and by extension, the Primes and sub-primes supplying into the programs) are not just interested in whether your widget or your tech is better than anyone else’s but also if you’ve got those underlying foundations so that they know they can trust you to be in it for the long haul.
It’s not just can you supply or provide something today: will you be around to keep providing something better tomorrow?
For an individual business, that makes profit and cash about more than just delivering a return to shareholders. They provide the capacity to invest, absorb shocks and keep building the capability your customers are relying on.
One downside of focusing on the customer so much can be that the parts of your cost base you and your team just don’t have time to investigate can quietly grow in the background.
It’s not usually a case of anyone making a mistake. What happens is little decisions that in isolation make sense over time build up to something which causes drag and creates opportunities for cash and profit to leak out; so you end up trying to fill up the bath with the tap of new work and new products, while your overheads plug is letting that profit drain away.
For instance, the suppliers you’ve trusted for a long time and have been on the journey with you, become part of the furniture.
There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily and they may bring benefits to your operation and your business which makes it worthwhile: but without knowing what else is available and whether they are providing what you really need, you don’t actually know whether you’re still getting good value.
The trick here then is to review what you’re paying for all the ‘other’ things that don’t directly deliver to the customer using data rather than emotion and looking at what you actually need and not what you think you might.
That way you make sure what you’re paying for is precisely matched to what will support your business.
For most businesses in Defence that’s a hard ask in an environment where capital, cash and management time are limited.
A project to go through the long tail of indirect costs can be the first thing shelved when something urgent needs to take priority.
That is where bringing in specialist external capacity can make sense.
ERA Group has more than 30 years’ worth of global experience in the kinds of indirect cost categories most businesses simply don’t have the time or specialist depth to challenge properly.
The aim is to make sure businesses pay the right amount for the right service, returning cash to the bottom line and freeing up management attention to focus on what matters most: delivering capability to the customer.