Business Spotlight: Champ Industries Inc.

Owner: Wilkins family

Founded: 1985

Address: 537 N. Highway C, Seymour, MO 65746

Phone: (417) 935-2067

Fax: (417) 935-2250

Web: www.champindustries.net

E-mail: champindustries@centurytel.net

Services: Milling, turning and welding, hydraulic testing, sandblasting and painting

Products: Aircraft engine lift trailers, aircraft maintenance platforms and work stands, disabled wheel dollies, component and spare parts

Employees: 10 full-time and 6 part-time

How’s this for a URL: https://www.dibbs.bsm.dla.mil. A mouthful perhaps, but broken down, it means: Defense Logistics Agency Internet Bid Board System. Business System Modernization. Defense Logistics Agency. Military.

Not long ago, a bid on a military contract might have required a visit to a military base to review postings on an actual bulletin board. Today, Kim Wilkins, president of Champ Industries, logs onto DIBBS and has at her fingertips requests for proposals and invitations for bids – almost anything related to the procurement of supplies and equipment by the armed forces.

For Wilkins and her 23-year-old little-known Seymour company, that means access to a lucrative sector of the U.S. government: Department of Defense contracts. The 2008 Defense budget is more than $480 billion. The Defense Logistics Agency handled more than $35 billion in total sales and services in 2006, the most recent year available, and Champ Industries has carved out a niche in federal ground support services.

Laying low

A trio of the Wilkins family – Kim, her mother-in-law, Wanda, and Wanda’s son-in-law, Vice President James “Ric” Patterson – runs Champ Industries, which began as Mechanical Equipment Sales in 1985, south of Seymour in Webster County.

Kim Wilkins explains: “We started building brakes, four-way valves, cylinders and we assembled casters,” all components of the engine lifts they build today.

A tornado forced a move to Cabool for a few years, but by 1993 the company was back in Seymour with its new name.

Champ Industries’ nondescript 12,000-square-foot facility sits just off C Highway, where one can hear the clip-clop of horses on the pavement as they carry their Amish owners and families to and from town.

“We have kept and maintained the lowest profile of any business around,” says Wanda Wilkins, secretary of Champ Industries.

Even though the company is a member of the Seymour Chamber of Commerce, most locals don’t know much about the business. “People in Seymour think we make airplanes,” Kim Wilkins quips.

300 components

While airplane manufacturing is not in its line of work, the equipment Champ Industries produces does help keep fighter jets in the air. Take the aircraft engine lift trailer, for instance. The towable device rolls under a jet engine and allows mechanics to disconnect it and then move the engine off the runway or perhaps out of the flight path on an aircraft carrier.

There are about 300 of these lifts scattered around the world, and Champ Industries had some part in almost all of them.

Each engine lift has about 300 component parts and most of Champ Industries’ work is in repairing, replacing or manufacturing some or all of those components. Two lifts, which run nearly $100,000 apiece, are currently in the shop; one awaits a final coat of paint and another is in the early stages of being refurbished. Another core product, a disabled wheel dolly, or skate, sits nearby.

Deployments of the lifts to sandy places such as Iraq have been challenging, as hydraulics are more susceptible to sand damage.

Champ Industries also works for agencies of foreign countries. During a facility tour, a buyer in Pakistan calls to ask how many spare parts would be needed in the first three years of the product, to which Patterson replies: “None. There should not be any failures in the first seven years.”

Eldo Meyer worked 27 years as a quality-assurance representative who visited Champ Industries several times a year to inspect the work.

“I’d verify their specs, dimensions, did they follow the terms of the bid and the contracts, review their documentation,” recalls Meyer, who is now retired from his civil-service job. “They knew what they were doing and produced high-quality work.”

Kim Wilkins likes doing business with the federal government. As a business owned and run by women – an unusual setup in the Defense-contracting arena – there are so-called “set-asides” available that require at least 5 percent of contracts to be let to woman-owned-businesses, based on the Women-Owned Small Business Procurement Program.

“When people say the government wastes a lot of money and they do things backward, they are probably somebody who didn’t follow proper procedure,” Wilkins says. “The government has really hammered vendors into becoming compliant with its way of thinking. If you do things the way they tell you, you will get paid and it is a convenient business. Give us a government contract over a commercial contract any day.”

Government Acronyms 101

DOD – Department of Defense

DIBBS – The Defense Logistics Agency’s Internet Bid Board System, a Web-based application that provides the capability to search, view and submit secure quotes on requests for quotations (RFQs) for DLA supply items. DIBBS also allows users to search and view request for proposals (RFPs) and invitations for bid (IFBs).

QAR – Quality Assurance Representative, an inspector or quality control person, usually civil service.

NSN – National Stock Number, a 13-digit numeric code, identifying all the “standardized material items of supply” as they have been recognized by the U.S. Department of Defense. A NSN is an official label applied to an item that is repeatedly bought, stocked, stored, issued and used throughout the federal supply system.

CAGE Code – Commercial and Government Entity, a five-position code that identifies contractors doing business with the federal government; Champ Industries is 0YGR5.

CCR – Central Contractor Registration, required for all vendors.

WOSB – Women-Owned Small Business Procurement Program.