pitch and topic a little; these people had no fault or play in his internal nightmare. “That’s why I ordered us lunch, and it’s a good one. We’re getting pizza from La Perla, special delivery.”
“Excellent.” Eddie Swanson cheered. “Nice choice!”
“Wasn’t La Perla a brand of lingerie?” Brad asked, making everyone else smile.
“Glad to see you know your lingerie brands, Brad,” Ellen answered, “but this is DC. Everything is different in DC; hence, this is a different La Perla. Very yummy.”
His team members were taking their normal seats around the conference room table. Eddie Swanson and Ellen Butler at his right, Jimmy Doherty and Brad Cooper at his left. The seat across from him, at the other end of the table, stood empty, a painful reminder of Laura’s tragic accident.
“What do you want to start with?” Robert asked. His meetings were relaxed and democratic, rather than top-down driven. He wanted his team members open-minded, rational, structured, and fearless in making decisions that carried considerable price tags.
“Let’s start with hardware,” Brad Cooper offered. Brad, the team’s senior project manager for strategic initiatives, was tasked with keeping everyone on track, on budget, and on time. He was precise and methodical, sometimes to a fault. Eddie sometimes joked about this, saying that there must be a robot inside his brain somewhere. “Something tells me hardware will be much easier than software.” He grinned.
“Yep, I can totally see that,” Ellen commented.
“All right, hardware it is then,” Jimmy said. “Not much of an array of choices from my perspective. All shortlisted vendors are from Asia. Two are from China, out of which one is from Hong Kong, one from Malaysia, and one from Taiwan. From a quality perspective they rank pretty close to each other.”
Jimmy Doherty took the laptop remote and projected a table with numbers.
“Very closely ranking on defects per million opportunities, warranty issues, shipping issues, failures after install occurrences, and overall resilience. These are all top-notch electronics manufacturers, working for major brand names like Sony, Apple, Texas Instruments, Lenovo, and others.” He clicked on to the next slide. “Some differences in time commitments, with the Taiwan vendor coming in a distant first. In shipping durations, Hong Kong ranks first followed closely by Taiwan, but all the schedules of delivery are pretty tight, with plenty of cushion for a timely delivery. Reminding everyone the e-vote tablets have to be in the central NSA vendor warehouse in Utah by end of August. September is for software installation, testing and deployment, October is for onsite sample testing and simulations, and November is for voting.”
“We didn’t forget any of that, but thanks,” Eddie said. “No one here can forget the details of the biggest whale of a contract we’ve ever worked on, right?”
“Nope.” Robert agreed. “So this will be a net cost call, then?”
“Appears like that. I went through Laura’s notes, and I see no recommendation in her files either. These top four vendors are very closely packed.”
Laura Roberts was an important, noticeable absence in this decision-making meeting. She had held the role of Senior Director, Vendor Assessment. Her business unit analyzed all aspects of vendor performance before bringing a recommendation to this team. Jimmy, as Director of Vendor Quality, worked closely with Laura’s team and was the most qualified to fill in for her.
“OK,” Robert said, “let’s look at dollars. Before dollars though, who ranks the highest?”
“Taiwan,” Jimmy said, “but only by a couple of points. Hong Kong is second.”
“OK, dollars. How many units did we call for in our RFPs?”
“Umm . . . 875,000 units,” Jimmy said, shuffling through papers.
“Remind me again how we got to that number?” Robert asked.
“Well, there are 185,000 electoral precincts in the United States. Nationwide, the specifications call for 3.3 units on average per precinct and one additional spare unit per precinct. That brings us to 4.3 units times 185,000 precincts, which is 795,550 units. We added the typical 10% reserve and rounded it slightly down to 875,000 units. All bids include cost, insurance, and freight, with delivery in Long Beach, California.”
“Let’s see the numbers,” Robert said. Jimmy clicked the remote and displayed a new data table, showing the five bidders listed by priority order of the total bid amount. Taiwan came in first.
“We have Taiwan with a total bid of 160 million, bringing the unit cost at $182 and change. Very close second the Chinese vendor, at 165 million, or unit price of $188. Numbers three and four were greedy.”
“Do we have any reason, concern, or strategic determination in favor