Bar code specialist A2B Tracking Solutions Inc. will receive up to $70 million over the next five years to help the Air Force comply with the U.S. Department of Defense’s Universal Identification (UID) property-labeling initiative.
Under UID, “everybody in the military has got to label everything,” Joan Hacker, A2B’s director of public relations, told Providence Business News in an interview last week. “What the Air Force is doing – and what this contract is all about – is, we’re actually going to be producing the labels and plates and everything for them.”
“It is exciting that a Rhode Island firm is on the cutting edge of this initiative, which aims to improve efficiency for defense operations at all levels,” U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, a West Point graduate and a member of the Senate’s Armed Services and Appropriations committees, said late last month in announcing that A2B had won the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) contract.
The contract award “is tremendous news for this firm and for the state,” added U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy. “It is exciting that a Rhode Island firm is on the cutting edge of this initiative. …
“Most exciting, however, is that the firm will be looking to expand its manufacturing space in Rhode Island and adding jobs here as a result of this federal contract,” Kennedy said.
Portsmouth-based A2B already has received its first three orders under the deal, “totaling about 2 percent of the total contract obligation,” Hacker said “Our first order is for 78,000 parts – that’s just a little toe in the door – so we’re needing to expand our space.”
The Air Force contract has two phases, she said. In the first, “we have a subcontractor who’s going to be helping us out with this. But in the second phase, which starts almost immediately,” A2B will be handling the whole process.”
“We are really a software company,” she said, “so we’ll be setting up shop.”
But A2B won’t be starting from scratch, noted President Peter Collins: “We already do some of this work for the Army,” although not on the same scale, he told PBN.
How much will the company be growing?
“I would say, safely, it’s going to be a doubling [to about 30]” of A2B’s current staff of 15, Collins said. “The project is going to be focused on quality and manufacturing processes, as well as software development, IT development,” he noted. About a third of those hired probably will be working in IT, he said.
It isn’t clear yet how much space A2B will need to accommodate the space-intensive manufacturing operation. “We’re in the Portsmouth Business Park,” and may look to expand within the complex, Hacker said. At present, Collins added, “we have a couple of offices here in Portsmouth,” totaling about 4,000 square feet.
Saul Kaplan, executive director of the R.I. Economic Development Corporation, called A2B “a strong company that has clearly demonstrated its ability to support our country’s national defense program and create good, high wages for Rhode Islanders.”
The company’s work on the Universal ID initiative dates back to the DoD’s release of UID standards nearly five years ago, when A2B “started to develop a system based on those standards,” Collins told PBN in a 2005 interview. By then, the company was working with the DoD, the various branches of the military and more than 10,000 military contractors to help them keep track of every big-ticket item with a unique ID number and permanent label.
The Air Force contract “is really the culmination, for A2B, roughly of five years of our technology and our services,” Collins said recently. “It’s interesting – these things take so long to really solidify,” he said. “We’ve been working on this [the Air Force deal] for probably a year and a half to get to this point.” •
