Federal Government Contractors provide a vast range of products and services to the Federal Government. What they provide is their mission or missions. It is the customer-facing part of what they do. What they provide and how they provide it is how they differentiate themselves from other organizations. It is useful to think of this as the “mission-critical” work.
On the other hand, the workstream for GovCon organizations to do their business, no matter what their mission, is very similar across GovCon organizations. We show this below in a simple depiction of the workstream. It has three main parts: Front-End, Middle, and Back-End. If you are in GovCon you must do this elements in order to do business. You can call these the “business-critical” work.
Each part of the GovCon workstream is unique to GovCon because they are selling to the Federal Government. It is different from selling to commercial organizations. In this article, we will discuss the three parts of the workstream and describe how the R3 GovCon Suite works to address the needs of the middle part of the workstream.
Front-End
GovCon organizations get opportunities from many sources. The obvious way is by working directly with people within Federal Agencies to develop opportunities. Also, Agencies provide information to central public services such as FedBizOps. And, if you are on an IDIQ/GWAC contract you also get advised of Task Orders. And, opportunities come from partners. In addition, multiple vendors provide services that aggregate these opportunities. They may be just data feeds or they may be curated by analysts to provide insight. Some of the vendors are Deltek GovWin IQ, ePipeline, Govini, Bloomberg Government and GovTribe.
The unique part of the opportunity front-end is that it ends up all being public information. The data sources have been standardized and commoditized by vendors for a number of years.
Middle
The middle of the GovCon workstream is the “make or break” part of the business operations. Opportunities are worked to be won as contracts, then the contracts are managed, and the delivery is managed. This is where the value is created, realized and preserved. It is the “core business operations”. You can break down the work into three distinct areas that are usually managed as separate business functions:
- Win contracts – Business development, capture management and proposal development
- Manage contracts – Contracts: managing customer facing contracts and subcontracts
- Deliver contracts – Program management: managing the delivery of programs/master contracts/contracts/task orders/delivery orders
The industry has developed best practices and standards for each of these 3 business functions and their sub-disciplines. They are driven by the requirements of doing business with the Federal Government. Yet, the level of systems maturity in this middle area differs greatly between organizations. It is not standardized and commoditized like the many formal systems supporting the Front-End and Back-End of the GovCon business workstream.
This middle part of the workstream is the most challenging to structure and manage. This is because the work is “mushy” – it varies. It is collaborative, requires workflow, is rich document oriented and often is reactive. You need process and standards but it cannot be too inflexible. GovCon organizations address the needs of this section in various ways. Their approach often depends on the size of the organization, the organizational structure and management approach and the maturity of their operations.
For instance, many small and mid-sized GovCon organizations get by using email, personal productivity tools (spreadsheets of Office Apps), simple file shares, SharePoint, and Google docs. They simple do much of the work manually. It works until it doesn’t fit the needs due to growth, scope or complexity. Then, they move to formal systems to organize the work. There are a broad range of tools and combinations of systems that can be used to address these needs. This is where R3 solutions fit in. We provide the GovCon solutions off-the-shelf, that are customizable and able to run as CMMC-compliant and ITAR-compliant solutions. We’ll look at these in more detail below.
Back-End
The Back End of the GovCon workstream covers the ERP/Financial and other corporate systems used to support the overall operation. This part of the business workstream is very standardized. It is also supported by a standard set of vendors of ERP system which are Deltek CostPoint and GCS, Unanet, Jamis Prime and Microsoft Dynamics. In addition, you can also find Quickbooks for smaller organizations and SAP for much larger organizations or those with a large proportion of commercial business.
These systems are unique to GovCon to support the required cost accounting, compliance and audit requirements (such as GAO, CAS, GSA, DCAA, FAR).
R3 GovCon Suite™ for the Middle of the GovCon Business Workstream
As discussed above, the Front-End and the Back-End of the GovCon business workstream are very standardized with a number of vendors offering almost commodity type software tools. The Middle area is different. There are a wide and varied set of approaches.
Historically, when companies looked to formalize the 3 business functions of the middle they would find systems built for commerical markets, for instance:
- They would look at CRMs designed for commercial/transactional sales.
- They would look at generic document repositories to use as proposal tools.
- For contracts, they may look at commercial contract management systems which are primarily oriented towards purchasing.
- And, when looking for something for program management they just find project management systems.
Most of these tools are not a great fit for GovCon business operations. They need to be extensively customized to properly address the unique needs of GovCon. Some organizations can afford to customize them. Most organizations just get by with what is available. So, they have to still do a lot of work manually, maintaining spreadsheets, having meetings, making reports. It has not been easy to get better in the middle.
Now, with the R3 GovCon Suite, we provide GovCon organizations with a practical option to take them where they want to be. We built a set of solutions to specifically address the needs of GovCon to manage these middle areas of GovCon business operations. We have solutions to Win contracts, to manage Contracts, and to manage Delivery of contracts.
These solutions are built on a common platform that provides an unusual level of flexibility to make changes. You can use just one solution or the full suite to provide a unified work environment out-of-the-box. You can run your R3 solutions within our R3 GovCloud Workplace, which is a CMMC-compliant and ITAR-compliant cloud service. Now, GovCon organizations can easily adopt formal systems for the middle of the GovCon business workstream that support growth and improve the quality and efficiency of business operations.
R3 provides the following solutions as part of the R3 GovCon Suite:
Win
- WinCenter for Capture and Proposal Management
- Task Order Factory
- Account Management
Manage
- Contract Management
Deliver
- Program Management
For more information, visit the R3 GovCon Suite overview page.