Topic: Cleared for Audit, Win with Intelligence: Proving Manufacturing Actual Cost on Commingled Government and Commercial Programs
 

Speaker: Barbara McElnea, Chief Strategy and Intelligence Officer, Dassian
 

Presentation:
For A&D finance leaders, manufacturing actual cost is a cash, margin, and growth issue long before it is a compliance issue. A material weakness in a contractor business system can withhold 5% of progress billings until it is fixed. Cost that lands on the wrong contract, or hides in excess and scrap, quietly erodes margin. And estimates built on incomplete cost history lose bids, or win them at the wrong price.

Winning teams treat actual cost as a strategic asset, not an audit artifact. Sharing material, labor, and capacity across government and commercial programs is how manufacturers compete, and it is exactly where the cost trail is hardest to prove. The discipline that lets you prove every dollar to DCAA and DCMA is the same discipline that lets you price the next program with confidence.

We will explore where commingled programs create exposure, what auditors really expect to see, and how leading finance teams turn their cost history into a pricing advantage.

Speaker's bio:

Barbara brings more than 33 years of experience in the SAP Aerospace & Defense industry, having led large-scale ERP engineering teams and delivered complex ERP projects. She is widely recognized as a thought leader and product manager for DCAA-compliant ERP solutions.  Her expertise also spans enterprise architecture, microservices, SAP on Azure, SAP RISE and AI-enabled SAP SDLC.