Privatizing government operations - a systems approach

The Hanford Area is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) reservation in Southeastern Washington, where the primary mission for nearly fifty years was production of nuclear weapons materials. It is now the nation's largest superfund site and its sole mission is environmental remediation of the mixed wastes generated during plutonium production. A large fraction of these wastes are stored in 177 underground tanks and are the subject of the DOE's Tank Waste Remediation system (TWRS) Program. Since its inception the TWRS Program has been managed by a Maintenance and Operations (M ampersand O) contractor. The DOE is now considering the privatization of a portion of this program and has recently issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) seeking new, qualified, private vendors. Successful bidders will be expected to build waste processing facilities with their own financial resources and to recover their costs by charging fixed prices for the various products delivered to the DOE. Because the TWRS Program is such a large, complex, and expensive undertaking, the privatization initiative will be conducted in two phases: a small proof-of-concept phase, followed by full-scale production. The key to a successful demonstration is establishing the right set of requirements to be satisfied by the private vendors. These requirements must be consistent with the existing requirements set developed over the past three years by the M ampersand O contractor. This paper presents the results of a systems engineering effort that was conducted in support of the RFP preparation and had to be coordinated with an ongoing program. Much of the effort was focused on the specification of new proof-of-concept requirements that are directly traceable to corresponding requirements in the M ampersand O's RDD-100 reg-sign database. A new functions and requirements database was created for this first privatization phase using CORE reg-sign, a systems engineering support tool, produced by Vitech Corporation