CACI puts focus on clients, community and its expertise

CACI International Inc. was far from immune to the economic downturn of the past two years, but a focus on the company’s core expertise, customer satisfaction and community involvement all played important roles in weathering the storm, said Paul Cofoni, the company’s president and chief executive officer.

“Our involvement in the support of our clients and the missions of our clients extends beyond the actual work we do in supporting their missions directly,” Cofoni said. “We also contribute to the social network of our client community.”

For CACI, that means supporting military support groups such as Comfort for America’s Uniformed Services. The group provides entertainment and recreational programs for recovering wounded military members.

CACI provides things such as DVDs and video games and sponsors breakfasts for recovering warfighters, Cofoni said. The goal is to help military members get through the initial phase of recovery while they are in a hospital setting, he said.

The company also has a program named Deploying Talent, Creating Careers in which CACI recruits disabled veterans to work at the company. More than 200 veterans have been hired through the program during the past two years, Cofoni said.

“We are trying to help stimulate a culture of really caring for our disabled veterans and helping them get re-established,” he said.

Providing an array of services in the defense and national security space, particularly for command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, continues to be the foundation of CACI’s work.

In 2009, for example, the company won a $24.5 contract to provide airborne, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance ground station support to the Army. As part of the program, the company will provide an intelligence system designed for aircraft. The system collects and processes intelligence data and transfers it to ground locations for subsequent processing, analysis, and dissemination.

CACI also won a $38 million contract to provide services to support the Army’s Distributed Common Ground System-Army. The system integrates intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance data within a single system to streamline the Army’s ability to process and disseminate data to commanders in the field. Using this intelligence information, field commanders gain a better situational understanding of their environment.

A CACI group that provides training to new Army recruits in detecting improvised explosion devices and asymmetric warfare also had success in 2009, Cofoni said.

“People who are part of that group were special operations personnel,” Cofoni said. They’ve completed their military careers and have come to work for us and have put together training and analysis capabilities to help the new soldiers as they go into the battlefield.”

CACI is also involved in a project that uses a matrix of optic sensors that seek to detect when someone tries to embed an IED. The company also provides technology designed to jam radio signals used to detonate IEDs remotely. And CACI is contributing to technology that detects patterns of radio frequency use that might reveal the impending detonation of an IED. Using the technology, warfighers can avoid potential danger zones, Cofoni said.

Working on projects that contribute to the immediate needs of the defense community has galvanized the company during tough economic times, Cofoni said. The attrition rate at the company is the lowest in six years, he said.

“The morale is high and the passion for our missions has always been strong here, and I would say is it an all-time high now,” he said. “The client satisfaction levels are also at an all-time high, and that’s important to us.”

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