“Quicklook” Assessment of Greater Adelaide's Assets & Challenges ...

• It is difficult to keep teams together – no one can carry a team waiting for the
customer to make a decision. They try to put a short leash on them, but they have
to be careful of the employees overall career expectations. Have to let them go or
put them on another project they will be more interested in.
• They need to balance projects in terms of resources. They can ‘park’ people
elsewhere, but getting them back can be difficult (Noel – ASPECT Computing,
largest IT company in Australia).
Chris Baker (Business Development Manager – SYDAC).Simulation engineers from
DSTO. 90% of their business is in the commercial arena. Dynamic simulations – training
simulations including visualization and audio. Also do decision support systems – key
area is gas industry – integrates manual and real time data with enterprise management.
Key customer is SANTOS – one system is used to manage fields.
• Defence solutions cannot be off the shelf solutions, so they are developed in a
spiral.
• There is a ‘stop/go’ nature of development.
• Resilience in companies comes from not being too dependent on defense. How
do the companies get involved in more commercial exports?
• Companies: need to find their own ways of commercializing their products.
• An export grant system is available – up to 200k of your expenses in exporting
(up to 50%) –Chris – this is done on a rebate system.
Concept Technology Demonstrator: part of a wider group of organization to get
funding for new projects. They structure this according to what industry is being
supported. They ask what the market opportunity is and the job creation.
Tried applying engineering skills and management skills in defense projects to
commercial world and that is a formula for failure. They would price themselves out of
the market because their process was too expensive. Operational maintenance support.
How does the new tax law on outsourcing affect you?
• This won’t affect this group much. Company tax rate has been brought back to
30%. The tax rate is 50% for employees. They are trying to prevent workers from
trying to work around the tax system by being contractors.
35 members interviewed and everyone has been trying to get away from 100%
specialization in defense projects. They want the teaming together to work for a prime
might be unnecessary – they want to get their own smaller projects that they might just
work by themselves. There has been a shift away from project eople and outsourcing the
entire project itself, so this makes it difficult for smaller companies to get contracts.
Is there some call from their industries to team together for commercialization (no on a
defense focus). This is the big question that is being asked today but they have tended
to stay with defense because the members see this as a focus for them and gives them
the ability to do more business for defense. They have other ways to get contracts
outside of defense. There is no obligation for members to team through the center.
Membership is relatively easy. They offer associates membership also – like recruiters,
lawyers, etc.
Defense is starting to implement scorecards – this is written around the US and UK
model. They are not confident that this will help their organizations. They view it as a
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