What Sivad Enterprises does
Sivad Enterprises works on three things inside aerospace and defense organizations — how the operation is run, who is leading it, and how well its people negotiate — and on the specialist work underneath them: government pricing, proposal cost support, supply chain, and contracts compliance.
The work stays inside aerospace, defense and the adjacent federal market, which means the methods arrive already fitted to FAR and DFARS, rated orders, flight-qualified hardware, and buyers who audit their suppliers.
Three practices, and the work underneath them
Ten service lines, led by the three the practice is built around, with the specialist work underneath them available on its own or inside a larger engagement, and each one opening onto the practice page behind it.
Operations
Running the operation behind an aerospace and defense program — the operating cadence, the supply base and buying plan, cost and schedule discipline, functions stood up from nothing, and the scaling or integration work that follows a large award or an acquisition.
Focus areas: Operating model and cadence, supply base and buying plan, cost and schedule discipline, standing up procurement, contracts or production control, scaling after a large award, post-acquisition integration.
Executive leadership and talent development
Coaching for executives and for the leaders stepping into those seats, from the technical lead promoted into a VP role to the first-time director, together with the succession planning that decides whether a function survives a departure — the emphasis being on decision quality and bench depth rather than on personality assessment.
Focus areas: Executive and manager coaching, succession planning, team capability mapping, retention, first-time-leader development.
Negotiation training and coaching
Structured training in how a defense negotiation is actually won — reading the counterparty’s cost stack, mapping approval authority, anchoring on the structure of a deal rather than its price, and knowing which terms a prime is free to trade and which ones the government wrote for it — delivered as a workshop, a multi-session program, or coaching that runs alongside a team about to walk into something large.
Focus areas: Cost and price analysis, term trading, sole-source strategy, FAR Part 15 certified cost or pricing data, live negotiation coaching.
Government pricing
Building the price structure a federal buyer can evaluate, document, and award — labor category rate cards across a multi-year period of performance, firm-fixed-price justification, competitive rate benchmarking, and the written responses to the government’s pricing questions during evaluation — which is the work the practice is most often engaged for, and the most current engagement on the record.
Focus areas: Labor category and rate card construction, firm-fixed-price justification, competitive rate benchmarking, government pricing question responses, FAR Part 12 commercial determination, first federal sale strategy.
Proposal and cost support
Cost volume and basis-of-estimate work inside a live bid cycle, for a team already committed elsewhere against a bid date that will not move: estimates structured against the work breakdown so a reviewer can trace any number to its source, the cost volume built against the technical volume rather than after it, and the whole of it delivered on the prime’s or the agency’s schedule and scoped to end when the bid does.
Focus areas: Cost volume construction, basis of estimate, subcontract pricing to a prime’s analysis requirements, plans and cost integration, capped bid-window engagements.
Evidence: Cost support inside a live bid cycle
Supply chain and procurement
Turning raw bill-of-materials and supplier data into buying decisions — what to order now, what to defer, who to consolidate onto, where the single-source and foreign-sourcing risk sits — along with the longer-horizon work in regulated, flight-qualified environments, where a schedule slip is a qualification problem before it is a delivery problem.
Focus areas: Plan for every part, supplier consolidation, reorder-point and stocking models, buy-now versus deferred analysis, domestic and single-source risk, long-term agreements, long-lead material positioning, purchasing process design.
Training and regulatory compliance
Training built around one organization’s own procedures, contract types, supplier base, and customer set, delivered so an internal facilitator can run it again after we leave — the documented example being Defense Priorities and Allocations System (DPAS) training for a supplier receiving rated orders it had no written process to handle.
Focus areas: DPAS and rated order training, regulatory and compliance training for suppliers, curriculum design, facilitator enablement, assessment, onboarding tracks for supply chain and contracts roles.
Contract management and compliance
Support for organizations selling to the government, whether through FAR Part 12 commercial terms, a FAR Part 15 negotiated procurement, or an Other Transaction Agreement, covering DFARS flowdown discipline, preparation for DCMA and DCAA activity, incurred cost proposals, Contractor Purchasing System Review (CPSR) readiness, and building a contracts function where none exists.
Focus areas: FAR Part 12, FAR Part 15, OTA vehicles, DFARS flowdowns, CPSR readiness, DCMA and DCAA audits, incurred cost proposals.
Advisory, market insight, and diligence
Advisory support on where a market is going, how a competitive position is holding, and what a transaction actually contains — and this is also where change management sits, because when a process, a system, or an operating model changes, getting an organization to adopt it is a separate discipline from designing it.
Focus areas: Strategic forecasting, regulatory and competitive positioning, buy-side and sell-side diligence on contracts and supply chain risk, transition planning, adoption and sustainment.
Speaking and workshops
Keynotes, panels, supplier summits, and conference workshops on government pricing, supplier strategy, and the working relationship between primes and their suppliers, with sessions built for the audience in the room rather than adapted from a standing deck.
Focus areas: Conference keynotes, industry panels, supplier and partner summits, half-day workshops, internal all-hands sessions.
How an engagement works
Every engagement runs through the same six steps; the depth changes with the scope, but the sequence does not, and the last step is the one that matters most, because the capability has to stay behind when the engagement ends.
1. Consultation
A scoping conversation whose useful version establishes what decision is driving the inquiry, who owns it internally, what has already been tried, and what the organization would consider a result.
2. Discovery
Review of the material that shows how the organization actually operates — purchasing procedures, contract files, rate and cost data, supplier lists, quote and award history, delivery and quality records — together with interviews with the people who do the work rather than only the people who manage it, and, where the site and the program allow it, direct observation.
3. Plan
A written plan stating what changes, in what order, who owns each change, what it depends on, and how the result will be measured against the baseline established in discovery — delivered before implementation begins, and short enough that an executive will read it.
4. Delivery
Sivad’s consultants work alongside the organization’s own people rather than in parallel to them, which depending on scope means building a rate card and a price justification, writing a cost volume, rebuilding a buying plan from raw BOM data, running training sessions, restructuring a supplier agreement, or standing up a function that did not previously exist.
5. Measurement
Measurement against the discovery baseline, followed by adjustment: training cohorts are surveyed after delivery and the results are shared with the sponsor (including the unflattering ones), and where an approach is not working it gets changed during the engagement rather than reported at the end of it.
6. Handover
The engagement is designed to end, and it ends when the capability stays with your team — rate cards, buying plans, and procedures documented, internal facilitators trained to run the material again, and the measurement scorecard handed over in a form the team can keep using — because the result we aim at is an organization that prices, buys, and contracts better without us in the room.
Start with a scoping call
The first conversation is a scoping call rather than a pitch, so bring the problem in whatever shape it is currently in, and the call will produce either a clear proposal or a straight answer that this is not work we should take.