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A new contracting vehicle worth up to $496 million will help the Defense Department build up its engineering capabilities to facilitate modernization efforts and support the agencys joint warfighting efforts, according to a Pentagon official.

DOD announced earlier this week it established a new small business indefinite-quantity, indefinite-delivery five-year contracting vehicle in November that will bring innovation to the department in seven areas. In a conversation with Nextgov about the contract, called Research, Development, Test & Evaluation, Engineering, and Technical Support, or RETS, Jim Faist, who led the effort, said the contract does more than just staff augmentation to fill needs gaps.

When I came into the Pentagon, what you find is that there really was no engineering capability to speak of, Faist said. Faist began his position as director of defense research and engineering for advanced capabilities in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering in 2018. When he came on board, Faist described pinpointing a need for real technical companies that have labs, facilities, equipment.

The RETS contract grew out of an industry survey, Faist added, and the result is a small-business set aside for companies with up to 1,500 employees that will embed technical prowess into the department. The contracts seven key focus areas are: modeling and simulation; operations research; mission engineering; developmental test and evaluation; prototyping; experimentation, and demonstration; science and technology research and assessment, and data management and analysis.

Each of these seven areas supports the Joint Staffs effort to define an architecture for its joint warfighting concept, Faist said.

Three companies were awarded the RETS contract: American Systems, Applied Research Associates, and Modern Technology Solutions, Inc., or MTSI. MTSI also won an initial $6.9 million tasking Nov. 25 for mission engineering.

Faist said the contract is a small business set aside because these companies are hubs for novel ideas and entrepreneurship.

So if you're if you're looking at [research and engineering], that's really our mission, to be outside the box, Faist said.

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$496M Contract Will Give DOD Engineering Capabilities, Official Says - Nextgov

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In August of 1910, Charles Davis Vail became a patient at St. Marys Hospital in Grand Junction, the result of a beating he received in Marble.

Vail later became famous as the chief engineer for the Colorado State Highway Department. Vail Pass was named for him in 1941. The nearby ski resort and ski town were given the same name after Vail died.

During his tenure at Colorados State Highway Department, Vail accomplished many things, including constructing the large arch bridge over the Eagle River near Redcliff, and overseeing improvements to the Million Dollar Highway now U.S. Highway 550 to allow automobile traffic between Ouray and Silverton.

He also developed the state highway over Wolf Creek Pass.

But Vail also made his share of enemies, including editors at The Denver Post and then-Colorado Gov. Big Ed Johnson.

And, as the information above indicates, Vail made some enemies long before he became the head of the highway department.

According to an Aug. 20, 1910, article in the Palisade Tribune, Vail was beaten by two men who had been working for him as subcontractors on a railroad spur in the mountains near Marble.

Besides other injuries, he received two fractures of the jaw and a broken nose, the Tribune reported.

Vail was taken first to the hospital in Glenwood Springs, then, because of the severity of his injuries, was sent by rail to Grand Junction and St. Marys.

His two assailants were arrested and jailed in Marble.

Charles Davis Vail was born in 1869 on a farm in Illinois, the sixth of seven children. Charlie, as he became known, taught elementary school in Henry, Illinois, while saving money to attend college.

He enrolled at the University of Illinois and worked part-time as an engineering assistant on a railroad project in South Dakota. He graduated in 1891 with a degree in civil engineering.

After graduating, Vail worked for several railroads, including the Union Pacific, and on water projects in Montana, Idaho and Canada.

He married Cincinnati native Jesse Rose Paden in 1893 in Denver, the city that would eventually become their permanent home.

But first, Charlie worked as an itinerant engineer, taking his wife and growing family to Utah, Nevada and Montana.

About 1906, Charlie was hired to build a branch of the Mexican International Railroad in northern Mexico. Jesse and the Vail children remained in Denver.

Early one morning in 1907, Charlie was visited by Pancho Villa, then a bandit who would later become famous as a Mexican revolutionary.

Villa seized all the railroad equipment and workers. He gave Charlie Vail a horse and some water, then demanded the American engineer leave Mexico and never return. Vail did just that.

Returning to Denver, Vail opened an engineering company, Vail, Wolbran & Read.

In that capacity, he worked on several projects on the Western Slope, including a municipal water system in the town of De Beque and the Price-Stubb Diversion Dam, which supplied water to the Mesa County and Palisade Irrigation Districts before the Government Highline Canal and its roller dam in De Beque Canyon were built.

He also worked for a time for the Uintah Railway, which was constructed between Mack, Colorado, and Dragon, Utah. Then he headed up construction for the Crystal River and San Juan narrow gauge railroad near Marble.

It was in that capacity that he angered two subcontractors, who claimed he had underpaid them, and ended up in St. Marys Hospital.

Exactly what he did the next few years is unclear. But, in 1917, he was appointed railway and hydraulic engineer for the recently created Colorado Public Utilities Commission.

He held that job until 1923, when he became manager of parks and improvements for the city of Denver.

During his time with Denver, Vail oversaw a tripling of the miles of paved road within the city, as well as installation of stoplights on many of those roads.

Denvers Civic Center, and the municipal park between it and the state Capitol, were constructed during Vails tenure. So was Stapleton Airport.

Additionally, he oversaw construction of municipal parks and mountain parks, including Red Rocks Park southwest of the city.

Vails reputation both for road building and controversy grew after 1930, when then Gov. Billy Adams appointed Vail as State Highway Engineer.

He received praise for paving hundreds of miles of state highways, and connecting highways to ensure there were complete routes through Colorado.

There were roughly 500 miles of paved roads when he became head of the highway department, but 4,400 when he died in early 1945.

He fought especially hard to improve highways on the Western Slope, even though the population here was small.

Mr. Vail has insisted that, if we are to have an integrated and uniform system of highways, mileage must have as much consideration as population, William Weiser, one of the Western Slopes representatives on the state highway board, wrote in The Daily Sentinel in June of 1939.

Vail also pushed for an increase in the states gasoline tax to 4 cents per gallon and repeatedly fought off attempts by the state Legislature to use that money for other purposes.

And he was perpetually arguing with federal highway authorities to get more money for the state, not an easy task in the midst of the Great Depression.

But he also made enemies, not just with Ed Johnson and the writers of The Denver Post, but with a number of businessmen.

Things came to a head in 1939, when a Denver broker named John McRoberts filed both a lawsuit and a complaint with the Civil Service Commission, seeking to have Vail removed from his job.

Among other things, McRoberts argued that Vail was too old, at age 61, to have been appointed to the top highway post in 1930, according to civil service rules at the time.

McRoberts also claimed that Vail failed to follow state bid rules when buying equipment such as trucks.

Additionally, there were accusations of wasteful spending and that Vail was hiding something in the 1939 highway budget.

But the attacks were all for naught. In 1939, the Civil Service Commission dismissed all charges against Vail, and the court case was eventually dropped as well.

A Sentinel editorial explained the papers view of the dispute: Nothing crooked, nothing out of line and nothing detrimental to the taxpayers of Colorado The only thing involved was Republican partisan politics (Vail was a staunch Democrat) and the bitter opposition of the Denver Post.

Not only were the charges against Vail dismissed, but another effort on his behalf was soon begun, led by the Eagle County commissioners.

In December of 1939, the commissioners asked the state highway board to give the name Vail Pass to the place where U.S. Highway 6 crossed the mountains east of Gore Creek. That was approved in 1941 and is today Vail Pass on Interstate 70.

Charles D. Vail died in Denver in January, 1945, while he was still chief engineer for the State Highway Department. He was 76.

Sources: Palisade Tribune and Steamboat Pilot through http://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org; The Daily Sentinel through http://www.newspapers.com; Palisade Historical Society; Charlie Davis Vail, The Highway Engineer Who Transformed Colorado Roads, by Thomas J. Noel, with Shelby Carr.

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Bob Silbernagels email is bobsilbernagel@gmail.com.

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Vails namesake was a controversial state highway engineer - The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel

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In this article we take a look at the 14 largest engineering companies in the world. Click to skip ahead and jump to the 5 Largest Engineering Companies in the world.

Want to find out the largest engineering companies in the world? Engineering and Construction are among the heavy industries where, in general, huge magnitudes of capital and scale are involved. Therefore, it is easy to guess that the top companies or the market leaders are the ones that are operating in a magnanimous scale of operations.

The engineering industry can be of various forms. Engineering can mean civil, military, or mechanical engineering. However, when talking about the industry, it is generally used in a contracted form to include those industry players that are involved in manufacture and dealing of machine tools, machinery or engines. The roots of industrial engineering can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution. It is one of the key industries that has been instrumental in giving us the transformation from manual to machines, and helped tap the huge potential of mass production through machines. It is this very industry that has accelerated the growth of global trade and brought the advantages of economies of scale into the picture for the first time. The industry itself has gone through a sea of change since then, with ever growing modernization efforts and technological advancements and more recently, integrating the potential of automation into the mechanical processes.

Global Industry Classification Standard defines the Engineering and Construction industry as companies engaged in primarily non-residential construction. It includes civil engineering companies and large-scale contractors, and excludes companies classified in the Homebuilding sub-industry. Engineering companies are therefore, the major contributors towards the high-precision machinery used in various other industries. The industry provides it expertise towards delivering technological solutions for other industries and is therefore, one of the most important industries out there. From the high rises we admire on our day to day lives to the high capital industrial projects, large scale projects are dependent on machinery and in turn, the engineering industry.

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Within the engineering space several companies often undertake the tender form of operation or turnkey projects. Please also check out the largest EPC companies in the world to find out more about engineering, procurement and construction companies that undertake these services on contract basis, for contracts awarded for particular project work as turnkey or provision of holistic services, whether it is in building of a specific plant or industrial unit.

2020 has been a tough year for many industries, especially for the ones involved in engineering and construction. Supply chain disruptions in several parts of the world due to the lockdowns are likely to cause constrained access to materials and unavailability of sub-contractors. In the short term contracts are expected to be suspended, as organizations and governments face the brunt of contingency expenses that the pandemic has caused. The industry is set to face some uncertain times with the running risk of cancellations of fresh contracts and re-negotiations on sanctioned ones. Companies with huge debts are likely to run into liquidity crises if unable to stabilize their financial positions. Also, being a labor intensive sector, the engineering industry has often been under the radar for safety on site and even more so in these pandemic times, where companies need to provide additional safety from the virus contraction in a labor intensive manufacturing unit. The engineering industry has always been in the spotlight of major labor issues of health and safety concerns. Safety incidents have often been prevalent in the past and risks include machinery risks, risks of accidents and physical injuries as well as risks of occupational diseases. Compliance of health and safety standards like OHSAS 18001, is often a prerogative in these industries. Risk of covid is an added risk to the already burdened safety requirements to be maintained within companies, which includes provision of proper personal protective equipment and multiple shifts to reduce physical contact.

The biggest players havent been secure from the COVID-19 impact and several of them have been facing stress. American conglomerate Honeywell International Inc.(NYSE:HON), that delves into the industrial engineering segment, has reportedly laid off close to 10K people from its workforce worldwide, in an attempt to reposition in the anticipation of the recession likely to be caused by the pandemic.

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Major players in the engineering market include American, European as well as Asian players, with China emerging in the dominant position. American players include ABB Company Ltd (NYSE:ABB) and Roper Technologies Inc. (NYSE:ROP) that even though dont make our list, are significant players in the market. While some players in our list are pure-play companies, others are engaged in multiple sectors as conglomerates. Our list is ranked based on the revenues of the companies and we have also reported the number of employees for each key player to give an idea of the scale of operations.

By the way, you are going to be surprised when you see the list of the top 5 engineering companies in the world. Lets now take a look at the list of largest engineering companies in the world:

Revenue - $36,709million

Number of Employees - 113,000

The American conglomerate is involved in several segments including aerospace, building technologies, performance materials, and safety and productivity solutions. The North Carolina based company is a Fortune 100 company, with a legacy of over 100 years. The company was involved in engineering and manufacturing projects for the US Military during World War II.

Soonthorn Wongsaita/Shutterstock.com

Revenue - $36,111 million

Number of Employees - 122,560

The China Energy Engineering Group is a state-owned energy conglomerate, headquartered in Chaoyang District, Beijing. The company is mainly involved in energy infrastructure construction services constructing hydropower stations, power plants, and other infrastructure, and was established in 2011.

Kzenon/Shutterstock.com

Revenue - $37,055.3 million

Number of Employees - 81,631

Mitsubishi ranks 12th in our list of the biggest engineering companies in the world. Under Japanese conglomerate group, Mitsubishi, the company is engaged in all types of engineering, electrical equipment and electronics segments. The company provides integrated solutions to several industries ranging from commercial aviation and transportation to power plants and gas turbines. The companys revenue figures in the first half of the year showed significant decrease from the same period of the previous fiscal year due to the impact of COVID19. However, it is set to be on a recovery track.

KRITSANA NOISAKUL/Shutterstock.com

Revenue - $42,543 million

Number of Employees - 130,500

The Bouygues Group, is a French industrial group with its headquarters in Paris, France. The company is listed on Euronext Paris exchange .The Group itself is engaged in diversified activities including construction (Bouygues Construction, Bouygues Immobilier, Colas), media (TF1) and telecoms (Bouygues Telecom), and a presence in 90 countries.

yuttana Contributor Studio/Shutterstock.com

Revenue - $43,706 million

Number of Employees - 190,431

ACS ranks 10th in our list of the largest engineering companies in the world. Spanish company is an engineering and construction company engaged in key sectors of the economy such as infrastructure and energy. The company was founded in 1997, and has a presence worldwide, including the United Kingdom and United States along with several locations in the APAC region.

Shaiith/Shutterstock.com

Revenue - $54,788 million

Number of Employees - 222,397

French giant, Vinci, is engaged in the engineering and construction domain, catering mainly to the infrastructure building industry. The company is involved in transport infrastructure and public amenities under public-private partnership agreements, and concessions include airports and autoroutes.

Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock.com

Revenue - $63,987.7 million

Number of Employees - 293,000

Headquartered in Munich, Siemens AG Company is a German industrial manufacturing company involved in several sectors, including healthcare and industrial automation. Siemens was embroiled in controversy for being the engineering company associated with the controversial Adani Carmichael coal mine in Queensland, Australia, in 2019.

ervickuz / Shutterstock.com

Revenue - $67,371 million

Number of Employees - 180,416

PowerChina ranks 7th in our list of the largest engineering companies in the world. A wholly owned government company, PowerChina, caters to more than 110 countries around the world. The company provides investment financing, planning and design, construction contracting, equipment manufacturing and management services within the engineering space. The company holds over 14,841 patents.

Phovoir/Shutterstock.com

Revenue - $80,386.8 million

Number of Employees - 301,056

Japanese conglomerate operates in several product segments including industrial solutions, IT solutions to mobility solutions. The company was founded in 1910 by electrical engineer Namihei Odaira.

Christian Lagerek/Shutterstock.com

Bosch Corporation

Revenue - $86,229.3 million

Number of Employees - 34,600

German multinational engineering and technology company, Bosch Corporation, is named after its founder Robert Bosch and came into existence in 1886. The company today has 129 engineering locations around the world and operates mainly in four divisions including mobility (hardware and software), consumer goods (including household appliances and power tools), industrial technology (including drive and control) and energy and building technology. In 2019, the Industrial Technology business sector generated over 10% of total Bosch Group sales, while the Energy and Building Technology business sector generated 7 %. Due to the Covid crisis, the Indian segment of the company lost significant orders down over $800 million for BS VI projects as the market dipped.

Click to continue reading and see the 5 Largest Engineering Companies in the world.

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Disclosure: No positions. 14 Largest Engineering Companies in the world is originally published on Insider Monkey.

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14 Largest Engineering Companies In The World - Yahoo Finance

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AUSTIN, Texas Lizy K. John and Van N. Truskett are the latest members of The University of Texas at Austin community to be selected as fellows of theNational Academy of Inventors, a prestigious distinction that has been awarded to a select group of 175 academic innovators around the world for 2020.

Truskett and John are the only two new fellows from The University of Texas at Austin in this years class. They join 14 previous inductees from UT Austin.

We are very proud of these two extraordinary members of our community, and I congratulate them on this tremendous honor, said Sharon L. Wood, dean of the Cockrell School of Engineering. Through their technology development and service to the university, Lizy and Van have inspired our students and strengthened our schools reputation as a global leader in engineering innovation.

John is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and she has made significant contributions to the evolution of computer architecture and systems design. She has authored two books on digital systems design, holds 13 U.S. patents and has co-authored more than 300 scholarly articles throughout her career.

Truskett, who graduated with a B.S. from the Cockrell Schools McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering in 1996, played a critical role in building Austin-based startup Molecular Imprints, which raised more than $150 million inventure capital before being acquired by imaging giant Canon in 2014. At UT Austin, Truskett uses her expertise in innovation and entrepreneurship to help faculty members and students launch startups and commercialize their research, serving as director of technology innovation development in the Office of Technology Commercialization and as executive director of the Texas Innovation Center.

Founded in 2010, the National Academy of Inventors aims to recognize inventors with patents issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, with an overall emphasis on innovation that clearly benefits society. The induction ceremony for this years honorees will take place June 7-9, 2021.

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2 Texas Engineers Honored Among Top Inventors in US - UT News - UT News | The University of Texas at Austin

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