SAIC hires former Northrop CFO as finance chief

Science Applications International Corp. has hired a new chief financial officer in Kenneth Crews, a two-decade Northrop Grumman veteran and formerly the latter’s CFO.

Crews will first join SAIC on Oct. 30 to work with current CFO Prabu Natarajan on the transition and then formally assume the role on Dec. 7, SAIC said Tuesday. Crews departed Northrop in February after 18 months as its CFO.

Natarjan, SAIC’s finance chief for the past five years, has been appointed to executive vice president of the civilian group on a permanent basis. He will also continue as EVP of enterprise operations, a position he was named to in January.

The operations-focused role includes the implementation phase of Project Orbit, an enterprise transformation process SAIC started in the spring to collect ideas from employees on how to increase the company’s agility and create more investment capacity.

In an Aug. 31 earnings call with investors, Natarjan said SAIC is pushing for $150 million in annual run-rate savings over the next three years with $100 million going back into the business.

“We effectively crowdsourced about 3,500 ideas from across the company, ideas for improvement, ideas all the way from cost savings to revenue maximization,” Natarjan said on the call. “We had a dedicated team that worked with a handful of external sherpas that actually helped us navigate the process of streamlining the ideas, bucketizing them, allocating some return criteria so that we can evaluate which opportunities need to be prioritized in the waterfall of opportunities that we have in front of us.”

Natarjan has led SAIC’s civilian portfolio on an acting basis since May, when then-civilian group EVP Srini Attili departed the company.

Crews worked as CFO for Northrop’s space systems segment prior to his appointment as finance chief for the corporation.