Fluor gains traction with new customers

Fluor Corp. celebrated its 100th anniversary this past April, and its burgeoning government business brought added excitement to the milestone by winning $2.7 billion in prime contracting dollars last year and reaching the No. 13 spot on the 2012 Top 100.

Overall, Fluor, of Irving, Tex., has been booming during the economic downturn. Its government business has followed suit by leveraging the company’s commercial capabilities and global footprint to meet growing demand for higher-order project management and construction management skills and energy efficient technologies and design processes.

“Fluor has really perfected its operating model for well over 100 years in how it provides different services, especially at the most fundamental levels in operation, maintenance and logistics,” said Bruce A. Stanski, president of the Fluor Government Group. “The more we can do everything that the broader Fluor has been doing so successfully around the world in the commercial space and bring it to our government customer, the more successful we are. Our feeling is that we can do it better than the next guy and more effectively and more efficiently. Our recent successes have demonstrated that our customers like our services and they want more of them.”

Fluor has tripled the size of its government business over the past three years, Stanski said, and much of his unit’s growth last year came from successfully achieving scope growth of existing contracts and also building on its core strengths and migrating them to similar but new government markets. “Providing that adjacency is the key to our growth,” he said.

For example, after nearly five years of providing military support services to the U.S. Army under the Logistics Capabilities IV program in Afghanistan, Flour was able to capture a new LOGCAP IV task this past April to support the U.S. Africa Command mission, including base operations, power generation, vehicle maintenance and the provision of food, water, fuel, laundry services and other needs.

Last year, Fluor also leveraged its track record as a contractor to the U.S. Army to capture significant new business within the U.S. Navy, winning a contract with a $318 million ceiling to provide operations support at the naval air stations in Jacksonville and Mayport, Fla., and the Blount Island Command and the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery in Jacksonville.

Fluor also added to its status as a Tier 1 contractor for the Environmental Management Organization within the Energy Department, with a new 10-year, $2.1 billion contract to decontaminate and decommission 10 million square feet of land and facilities at the Energy Department’s Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plan in Piketon County, Ohio. Stanski said that the company’s success at performing this type of work at other Energy sites, including the Savannah River National Nuclear Laboratory near Aiken, S.C., and Hanford site near Richland, Wash., is helping the company move into the nuclear non-proliferation business for the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration.

Stanski said that with budget cutbacks at the Defense Department and an environment of austerity pervading the federal space, Fluor is positioned well to win even more business in the coming year.

“As the budget constraints within the government become tighter and tighter, it makes government customers far more selective in how they spend their money, and that really plays to our strong suit,” he said. “That draws them to us, so even though budget problems can be seen as a negative, with our offerings, we see it very much as a positive.”