With the defense budget facing cuts, defense contractors are finding ways to make their products more effective and, thus, more valuable to soldiers and more efficient for those of us who foot the bill. This fascinating Business Week story gives us a glimpse into how it’s being done by focusing on contractor reps who go into the war zone and watch how their products are used, see firsthand the bugs and aggravations, and then call for a fix that makes the soldier happy and gets the contractor more business. Even in war, competition leads to better outcomes. Here’s a taste:
The company’s willingness to change its product on the fly has helped it to win over commanders in the field and sell more than 10,000 of the radios to the military for $30,000 apiece. “You’re not going to know what the customer wants unless you’re sitting right there with them at the moment they become aggravated about something,” Reinhold says.
Radio knobs and metal bits aren’t likely the first things that spring to mind when you think “defense contract.” Yet this unglamorous side of the business is where a lot of the money is made, and where it’s often easiest for contractors to penetrate—or even sidestep—the Pentagon’s forbidding bureaucracy. Over the last decade, U.S. defense contractors such as Harris and truckmakersOshkosh (OSK) and Navistar International (NAV) have dispatched engineers and sales personnel, often ex-military, to Iraq and Afghanistan to maintain equipment and promote their gear directly to U.S. troops.
