By Marina Malenic
A management tool used by Lockheed Martin‘s [LMT] aircraft unit to track program costs yesterday lost its Pentagon certification due to “system deficiencies” and delayed action in correcting those problems, the Defense Department said yesterday.
During annual surveillance conducted by the government at 11 Lockheed Martin sites, the company “was informed of deficiencies in their Earned Value Management Systems (EVMS),” said Pentagon spokeswoman Cheryl Irwin.
Major government contractors are required to use EVMS to track spending by comparing real costs against projections. Lockheed Martin’s EVMS tracked the performance of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter development program, among others.
The company had developed corrective action plans to address their non-compliance against the 32 EVMS guidelines, according to Irwin. While most of the company’s sites have made “good progress” in addressing the problems, its Ft. Worth plant–the site of F-35 production–“continues to make inadequate progress against its corrective action plan,” she said.
“Withdrawing the EVMS compliance will help ensure that [Lockheed Martin] devotes the needed attention to complete the [corrective] actions in a timely manner. It also reinforces the responsibility the company has to deliver to the government what it agreed to under the terms of the contract,” she added.
Lockheed Martin officials did not reply to requests for comment by press time.
Meanwhile, a software problem that last week resulted in the grounding of the F-35 test fleet is still pending a fix. Pentagon officials said they expected flights to resume on Oct. 5, but the grounding was still in effect at press time.
The defect was detected on the ground and relates to the code that controls the engine’s three fuel boost pumps.
“The minor software modification will correctly align fuel boost pump signal sequencing,” Irwin said in a statement.
“It could possibly trigger a shutdown of all three boost pumps, potentially further causing engine stall,” she added. “Such a simultaneous shutdown is unlikely, but prudence dictated a suspension of operations until the fuel boost pump signal timing was corrected.”