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CEO Q&A: L3’s Chris Kubasik and Harris’s Bill Brown
BY MARCUS WEISGERBER
Soon after the companies announced plans to form the world's 7th-largest defense firm, the CEOs rang up for a joint interview.
On Sunday, just after L3 Technologies and Harris Corp. announced their planned merger next year, I chatted with CEOs Chris Kubasik and Bill Brown about their plans to form L3 Harris Technologies, which would be the world's 7th-largest defense firm. Here are some excerpts.
Q. How did this come together?
Brown: Chris and I have known each other for a number of years here, and a lot of it started more socially, not from a business perspective. We work in the same space as complimentary businesses, complementary portfolios. Same [main] customer. You know we realized, given where we stack up in the defence hierarchy, this would be a great potential combination. We've been discussing it through the balance of this calendar year. [It] really picked up steam in the summer and were able to bring it forward here towards middle October.
Q. Why a merger rather than an acquisition by one partner?
Kubasik: Both companies are quite strong, and we're both on an upswing, and we looked at all the different stakeholders from the customers, the shareholders and the employees. And in our relative size and market value, a merger vehicle seems to be the absolute right way to go here. True partnership, as you've probably seen. 50/50 board. Bill and I have our leadership laid out clearly. It's absolutely the right way to do this. We're quite proud that we're able to pull it off. And I think it's the best way to serve all the stakeholders.
Q. Bill is going to be CEO until a transition to Chris in a couple of years. How will that work? And what happens to L3's New York office if the headquarters moves to Florida?
Brown: The combination in bringing these two great companies together is going to take a lot of work. So Chris and I will partner on this, in leading the company [and] clearly doing a lot of the integration. We're going to chair the integration committee together. I'll have responsibility for the enterprise functions, and Chris will keep an eye on the ball in what we do operationally in the business segments making sure that through to the integration we don't miss a beat in our growth agenda, meeting expectations of customers, delivering on programs. It's going to be a shared partnership in bringing the companies together.
Kubasik: On a combined basis, we have several thousand employees in the state of New York, a lot in Rochester, of course Long Island and the surrounding areas. We got to do to what we believe is best for the business. When you look at the Space Coast of Florida, the 7,000 or so employees and infrastructure in the Melbourne area, it's an easy decision. We'll be transitioning from the headquarters from New York and taking the best of the best and moving to Florida. At some point the Manhattan office will either be significantly scaled down or ultimately closed.
Q. Will the combined company divest or combine overlapping sectors?
Bill Brown: Very high and complimentary portfolios. So we see very, very, very little overlap.
Q. L3 has been on an acquisition spree in recent years. Should we expect more, perhaps in the maritime sphere?
Kubasik: Job one is going to be the integration for the first couple years, so there will be very, very few, if any, acquisitions the first couple of years. They would have to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We're going to focus first and foremost on integrating this company. Once we get this integrated, which is a three-year program, we'll update and modify the strategy as appropriate.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the proposed merged company's rank by revenue among global defense firms.
This Q&A is part of the weekly Global Business Brief newsletter by Marcus Weisgerber. Find the rest of this week's issue here,and subscribe to get it in your inbox, here.
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Robots and Lasers Are Bringing Shipbuilding into the Digital Age
BY MARCUS WEISGERBER Even decades-old aircraft carriers are being mapped onto digital models at Newport News Shipbuilding. NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — When the USS George Washington took shape here in the late 1980s, endless paper blueprints guided the welders and shipfitters of Newport News Shipbuilding. Now, with the aircraft carrier back in a drydock for its midlife overhaul, shipyard workers are laser-scanning its spaces and bulkheads. They're compiling a digital model of the 104,000-ton carrier, which will allow subsequent Nimitz-class projects to be designed and planned on computers. That will help bring the shipyard's carrier-overhaul work in line with its digital design-and-manufacturing processes that are already speeding up construction and maintenance on newer vessels. Newport News executives say these digital shipbuilding concepts are revolutionizing the way ships are designed and built. “We want to leverage technology, learn by doing and really drive it to the deckplates,” Chris Miner, vice president of in-service carriers, said during a tour of the shipyard. This is the future. This isn't about if. This is where we need to go.” This storied shipyard, now a division of Huntington Ingalls Industries, has been building warships for the U.S. Navy for more than 120 years. Some of its buildings are nearly that old, and some of its employees are fifth-generation shipbuilders. But the technology they use to design, build, and overhaul submarines and mammoth aircraft carriers is rapidly changing. Paper schematics are quickly becoming a thing of the past, being replaced by digital blueprints easily accessible to employees on handheld tablets. “The new shipbuilders coming in, they're not looking for you to hand them a 30-page or a 200-page drawing,” Miner said. “We're really transitioning how we train folks and how we do things as far as getting them proficient.” This digital data will “transform the business,” said Miner. The technology is spreading beyond the shipbuilding sector. Boeing used digital tools to design a new pilot training jet for the Air Force and an aerial refueling drone from the Navy. The Air Force is planning to evaluate new engines for its B-52 bombers, nearly six-decade-old planes, using digital tools. The technology is allowing companies to build weapons faster than traditional manufacturing techniques. Engineers here at Newport News Shipbuilding are already using digital blueprints to design ships, but they plan to expand the use of the technology into manufacturing in the coming years. “We want to be able to leverage off all that data and use it,” Miner said. “There's lots of things we can do with that [data].” The USS Gerald Ford — the Navy's newest aircraft carrier and first in its class — was designed using digital data. The Navy's new Columbia-class nuclear submarines are being digitally designed as well. Parts for the future USS Enterprise (CVN 80) — the third Ford-class carrier — are being built digitally. Data from the ship's computerized blueprints are being fed into machines that fabricate parts. “We're seeing over 20 percent improvement in performance,” Miner said. When the Navy announced it would buy two aircraft carriers at the same time, something not done since the 1980s, James Geurts, the head Navy acquisition, said digital design would contribute to “about an 82 percent learning from CVN79 through to CVN 81” — the second through fourth Ford ships. Geurts called the savings “a pretty remarkable accomplishment for the team.” In the future, even more of that data will be pumped directly into the manufacturing robots that cut and weld more and more of a ship's steel parts. “That's the future,” Miner said. “No drawings. They get a tablet. They can visualize it. They can manipulate it, see what it looks like before they even build it.” As shipyard workers here give the George Washington a thorough working-over, they are using laser scanners to create digital blueprints of the ship. These digital blueprints are creating a more efficient workforce and reducing cutting as many as six months from a three-year overhaul, Miner said. The top of its massive island — where sailors drive the ship and control aircraft — has been sliced off. It will be rebuilt in the coming months with a new design that will give the crew a better view of the flight deck. The island already sports a new, sturdier mast that can hold larger antennas and sensors. Shipyard workers lowered it into place in early March. The yard is also combining its digital ship designs with augmented reality gear to allow its designers and production crews to virtually “walk through” the Ford class's spaces. This helped the yard figure out, for example, whether the ship's sections were designed efficiently for maintenance. In addition to robots, the additive manufacturing techniques, like 3D printing, could speed shipbuilding even more and reduce the Navy's need for carrying spare parts on ships. The Navy is testing a valve 3D-printed here. Right now, at a time when the Navy is planning to drastically expand its fleet size, shipyards like Newport News are expanding, but not yet to the levels of the Reagan military buildup of the 1980s. Despite the technology advantages, Miner said people still play essential roles in the manufacturing process. “It's really not about reducing our workforce as much it is about doing more with the workforce we have,” he said. “We're still going to hire people. We still have to ramp up. There's still hands-on things that are always going to have to be done. But it definitely helps us with cycle time to be able to build things quicker” and “enable our workforce to be more efficient.” https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/05/robots-and-lasers-are-bringing-shipbuilding-digital-age/156763/