Atkins Signs Major New Contract with DTIC - 08 June 2009
Atkins, the UK's leading engineering consultancy, has been awarded a contract to provide support to the Capability Vision Project Support Office (CVPSO) at the Defence Technology and Innovation Centre (DTIC) in Shrivenham. The CVPSO, which also includes both DTIC and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) staff, provides centralised co-ordination and communication across the five Capability Visions launched in February this year. The CVPSO will also work across the collective MoD delivery organisation with strong relationships being delivered between SIT and DE&S in order to achieve rapid and effective exploitation of S&T into MoD programmes.
The five Capability Visions form part of the Defence Technology Plan to identify innovative options to address major defence challenges. They are intended to promote a longer-term perspective to stimulate new activity in the wider R&D community, to act as a guide for industry funded research and for suppliers to seek new applications for existing technologies.
Atkins is providing technical and project management expertise to the programme and, with over 12,000 staff in the UK has both the capacity to react to surges in resource demand and reachback to provide specialist expertise to the CVPSO team. Atkins will focus fully on CVPSO support and will therefore remain totally independent with regards to the direct delivery of equipment and the associated supply chain.
Alan Buckland, Managing Director of Defence at Akins commented "We are pleased to be supporting the DTIC in this transformational programme where we can take revolutionary ideas and quickly turn them into an experimental operational capability that will be tested in a military context to address urgent defence challenges. This is a great example of how Atkins' independence promotes a collaborative working environment where the MoD, industry and academia can work together to deliver such visionary programmes of work, and where new and emerging technology will ultimately provide our forces with the very latest technological advancements".