HAMPTON, Va. –
My DCMA showcases the Defense Contract Management Agency’s experienced and diverse workforce and highlights what being a part of the national defense team means to them. Today we meet Erin Babcock.
My name is Erin Babcock and this is “My DCMA.”
I am an administrative contracting officer at DCMA Hampton.
My job duties include providing ACO assistance to my subteam of contract administrators, processing final vouchers and progress payments, assisting with workload acceptance issues, providing contract receipt and review, and assisting with the resolution and disposition of audit reports coming in from the Defense Contract Audit Agency. I am on hand to review documents that require ACO signature and be a source of good information for my contract administrators as they tackle their individual workloads.
I have been a part of the DCMA team for four years. I started in October 2013 as a contract administrator at DCMA Manassas.
I like working at DCMA because this is the best team atmosphere I’ve ever been a part of. Everyone steps in to help one another to get the job done and support the warfighter, and at the end of the day, it’s inspiring and humbling to know that our actions are directly enabling our mission partners to get supplies to the warfighters who need it in the United States and overseas.
I am the independent eyes and ears for the Department of Defense because I have clear insight into the acquisition process. I have the ability to report issues when I see them and prevent them from becoming potentially larger problems for DoD later on down the road.
I provide actionable acquisition insight to DoD by providing practical, on-the-ground feedback to buying commands about the business systems and practices of federal contractors with which they are doing business. When we find problems, we are quick to report them and take action to get the contractor to resolve whatever has gone wrong in the process. Acquisition involves a lot of moving parts, and if a contractor’s internal practices such as its accounting or estimating systems are flawed, it’s going to impact the buying activities’ ability to rely on that contractor. It is DCMA and the ACO’s job to take action and ensure that those issues are given the attention required in order to resolve them.
DCMA is important to America’s warfighters because we are often the first-line inspectors of equipment that is necessary for the warfighter to do his or her job. It is up to us to work hard, work together, and be a consistently reliable cog in the machine that gets supplies into the hands of the people who need them, because ultimately we rely on those people for our own safety and our livelihoods here at home.