At Fairfield Technologies, we use the following three elements to offer our clients strong performance-based contracts capabilities:

• FTI’s Strategic Focus On Performance-Based Service Contracting - As a strategic policy decision, FTI has converted as many contracts as possible to performance-based contracts; even when not required by our clients, FTI still manages our own and our subcontractor project efforts to performance-based metrics. Our contracts are bid, won, and managed using performance work statements (PWSs) to help achieve specific performance metrics, with performance reports delivered on a scheduled basis measuring progress against metrics, having a defined quality assurance surveillance plan (QASP) to guide evaluation and documentation of results. We feel that we can be more effective when we measure and are measured on success against appropriate metrics; this approach strongly incentivizes and rewards FTI’s “customer-focused, work smart, results-oriented” culture, rather than measuring success based on the number of hours billed.
  
  
• FTI’s Strong Focus on Standardizing and Enhancing Our Own Internal Quality Management Processes - ISO 9001 represents an internationally-recognized quality management systems approach to performance. Fairfield Technologies recently completed evaluating and documenting our own internal methodologies according to ISO 9001 standards, focusing special attention on processes which we use to: 1) Help our customers define their requirements, 2) Design and deliver solutions to meet those requirements, and 3) Evaluate our customers’ satisfaction with FTI-delivered results. Based on our internal evaluation, we believe our operations in these areas are ISO 9001-compliant; we are currently pursuing the formal standards registration process, which we are projecting to complete during late 2004. FTI has also begun a project to integrate performance-based contracting principles into our ISO 9001-compliant processes, a step that will allow us to further improve internal quality systems performance.
  
  
• Committing Senior-Level FTI Staff To Deliver Performance-Based Management For All Projects, Right From The Start - FTI believes that a strong commitment to performance-based contracting is the right approach for our clients’ work, regardless of whether these tasks are initially planned as performance-based services or not. As a key success factor of our approach, FTI will assign a Performance-Based Contracting Director to all client work. This Director will work extensively with customer and FTI management and personnel throughout all project phases to jointly develop effective project work statements, establish appropriate metrics for measuring project success, and the quality assurance surveillance plans for capturing and evaluating performance measurements. We believe that such extensive and continuous senior-level commitment helps our customers establish and maintain leadership in performance-based contracting efforts in the Federal Government.

Leading organizations, whether government or commercial, are moving strongly to a performance-based contracting approach, with rewards strongly tied to achieving defined performance and quality goals. Some organizations believe that outsourcing technical and scientific services overseas, where hourly wages can be a fraction of those in the U.S. market, is the only way to succeed. Fairfield Technologies strongly believes that our “work smart”, performance-based contracting approach is the superior solution, and will allow our team to attain better, faster results, and at a lower cost to our customers’ key projects.