DoD Acquisition Process

These documents and the requirements that they spell out are important in that they establish a management grid that the
various participants in the acquisition process must follow. However, they do not describe the industrial process, nor do
they provide intelligence on the management and control of those technical activities and their related details that can either make or break a program. What has evolved as today’s management system for material acquisition hardly recognizes
the importance of development and production, much less does it utilize the vast resources of development and production data in any decision process. “Manage the fundamentals of design, test, and production and the management system will describe itself.” However, and this is a particularly important point, the converse can never be true! It is impossible to describe the management system first that will take care of the fundamentals of the industrial process-engineering and manufacturing.