Richard Baily has worked on missiles and rocket engines.
Overseeing the move of 3,700 Boeing Co. workers from Anaheim to Huntington Beach,a process spanning the next five years,is his biggest project yet.
In July, Boeing said it would close its 1.7 million-square-foot Anaheim campus and move everybody there to its largest site in Orange County, a 2.6 million-square-foot complex in Huntington Beach.
Baily, vice president of Boeing’s Command, Control and Communications division, is tasked with moving the brain-center for big defense programs worth billions of dollars.
There’s no room for error.
The move is set to go gradually with lots of oversight,a strategy used by Boeing managers on major government programs.
“The way we are treating this is like a regular program,” Baily said. “This is all about figuring out the tasks that need to be done, setting up the structure to manage those effectively, and making sure you do the execution.”
All the while, Baily has to make sure the move doesn’t disrupt any of the contract work at either site.
“Our first focus in this is that we can’t miss any program commitments,” he said.
It’ll take a village to make it happen: About 10 Boeing employees work full time on managing the move.
Baily’s staff leads four teams: functional integration, facilities, people and business management.
There’s also a change board that must approve anything not in the plan.
Move’s Public Face
Baily’s first job is to be the company’s public face of the move. He meets with the major players involved at both sites and provides support.
He wears a lot of other hats.
Baily is site administrator for Anaheim and Huntington Beach. As vice president of the Command, Control and Communications division,known as C3,he’s responsible for profits and losses for many programs, including intercontinental ballistic missile guidance systems, the Network and Information Systems Group and two Boeing programs in Australia.
C3 is part of the Network and Space Systems group in Boeing’s St. Louis-based Integrated Defense Systems.
The defense business,the flipside to Boeing’s commercial plane business,does about $30 billion a year from big programs including Minuteman missiles and advanced military communications.
How do you go about moving top-secret defense programs?
“Prep before move,” Baily said.
Boeing has spent months creating elaborate checklists and timelines to ensure security rules and deadlines are met, he said.
“You have to meet the security requirements mandated in the contract,” Baily said. “The specific move schedules are geared around when the facilities are ready and individual programs hit a milestone point.”
The move is planned to take place in three phases.
Boeing is finishing a big research phase, where officials mapped out logistics such as how much laboratory space is needed, and how many people are going where, Baily said.
Construction is under way at the Huntington Beach site to prepare buildings for labs.
“We are spending some time now to try and get those right,” Baily said.
He declined to say how much the move will cost. When all is said and done, Boeing stands to make money on the move with the sale of the Anaheim land and reduced costs.
One reason why the move is spread over half a decade is to manage the costs, Baily said.
A year from now, about 1,500 Anaheim employees are expected to have moved, Baily said, completing the first phase.
By the end of 2008, about 2,700 workers will have moved.
The last 1,000 people will move in 2010.
Two Anaheim-based satellite programs are set to shift to Boeing’s 850,000-square-foot site in Seal Beach, just up the sand from the Huntington Beach site.
The Space Based Surveillance Systems program’s move of close to 60 people to Seal Beach is expected to be completed by year’s end. The Global Positioning System program plans to move 300 workers early next year.
So far, “everything’s going to plan,” Baily said.
Workers are getting antsy.
“That’s the flipside of telling everybody as soon as you decide,” Baily said. “Everybody’s anxious. They want to know, ‘Where’s my cubicle?'”
Huntington Beach employees, too, are nervous about the newcomers.
They’ve seen a lot of changes already this year.
Huntington Beach’s Delta rocket group, with about 950 workers, will move to the Denver area as part of a planned satellite combination with Lockheed Martin Corp. The move is helping to make way for the Anaheim workers.
Different Cultures
Integrating the two different cultures at the sites might be tough.
The Anaheim site has some of Boeing’s oldest defense programs, including technology for a 50-year-old submarine. Huntington Beach has some of the newest, including flashy military computer networks.
“People in Huntington Beach, while they want to be proud and hold on to some of their tradition, they also know that to keep their site vital and keep jobs going for the future that change has to happen,” Baily said.
The loss is big for Anaheim. The city is bidding adieu to an operation that helped put it on the map during the Apollo era.
“It was kind of tough to talk to the mayor and say that his second-largest employer (after Walt Disney Co.) was going to be leaving,” Baily said.
Boeing’s Anaheim operations are the centerpiece of the city’s industrial corridor along La Palma Avenue near the Riverside (91) Freeway.
Irvine-based Boeing Realty Corp. is set to handle the sale of the buildings and land. The site is likely to remain industrial.
Boeing’s sprawl in Anaheim amounts to 18 major buildings on about 100 acres.
Through the years, Boeing has sold off chunks of industrial space at the site, leaving a checkerboard-like campus.
Boeing Realty typically rezones sites before selling them in a bid to get top dollar.
The city is pushing for medical device makers, precision manufacturing companies and other high-paying industrial businesses to take over some of Boeing’s buildings.
Boeing has had only preliminary talks with the city, Baily said.
The sale of valuable land didn’t play into the decision to leave Anaheim, he said.
The move is about streamlining operations by pairing programs together and getting rid of underused space.
The shift fits with a larger trend at Boeing’s Southern California operations: moving away from the old-line production of rockets and missiles to engineering computers, software and electronics for a high-tech military.
“We’ve got 31,000 people here” in Southern California, Baily said. “It’s a key location for intellectual property,our people,who know how to do development programs and execute these large scale system integrations. We’ve become more of a development-oriented activity center.”
Baily, 49, said the course of his career is “kind of a reflection of what’s going on in the industry.”
He’s been at Boeing for 27 years.
“I used to work on space shuttle main engines and be the program manager on the Delta rocket,” he said. “All of those you would associate with space activities and a lot of hardware stuff. My transition was into the network-centric operations.”
Despite spending more than half his life at Boeing, Baily defies the space engineer stereotype. He’s tall, tan and married to a pro beach volleyball player.
They live in Huntington Beach with their two children.
During his long career, Baily has held leadership positions at a number of Boeing’s star programs, such as the Delta IV and Future Combat Systems.
Before Boeing, he led the operations unit of Rocketdyne in Canoga Park, now part of United Technologies Corp.’s Pratt & Whitney.
Perhaps his most difficult job: convincing Anaheim employees that the site’s 50 years worth of contributions to the company and to the country won’t be lost in the move.
“One of the things I told them is that organizations are about their people,” Baily said. “It’s not about the buildings. Buildings don’t have personalities. The buildings don’t work hard and sweat every night to get it done. You still have your people,their history, the lessons learned and the mentors that have passed that along. And we will take it with us.”
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Drive Time
Moving 3,700 people is no easy feat.
In Orange County, the land of hearty commutes, it’s downright Herculean.
Rick Baily, who is heading up the closure of Boeing’s Anaheim site and the move to Huntington Beach, is trying to strike a balance for the 10% or so of Boeing folks who’ll have miles tacked onto their commute.
“We are really taking this seriously,” Baily said. “We don’t want to lose people. But on the other hand the business reality is that we had to take some action.”
About 90% of Boeing’s Anaheim and Huntington Beach employees live within 30 miles of Surf City, Baily said.
The average drive to work for a Boeing worker will grow by five to seven miles after the relocation is done, according to surveys.
For those commuters who aren’t average, such as those who drive from the Inland Empire, it’s a big issue.
“You can cover the 20 miles from Anaheim to Huntington Beach during certain times of the day in 25 minutes,no problem,” Baily said. “I know you can’t equate radial distance to time. We recognize that it takes its toll on people.”
The company fears it could lose workers during the five-year ordeal.
“We’d like to make it so that all of them feel it’s the best thing to keep working on the job at Boeing,” Baily said. “But it’s probably unrealistic to think that that’s the right answer for every single person.”
The company is willing to implement some alternatives.
One option is executive buses, offices on wheels with space for about 30 desks, phones and wireless access.
Another is building a “hoteling center,” secure, remote sites that allow workers access to office equipment and the Boeing network. Boeing already has centers across the country.
Another alternative is to implement flexible schedules that allow for telecommuting or shorter workweeks.
The company even is talking with the Orange County Transportation Authority to see about running a bus from transportation hubs to the Huntington Beach site.
Commuters will have an easier time when construction on the Garden Grove (22) Freeway is finished, Baily said.
,Sarah Tolkoff
