There is a critical moment in the lifecycle of Federal Government Contractors when they emerge from being a small business and must now compete in full and open competition. It is a challenge. R3 helps graduating GovCon firms get competitive by using software to leverage their people and optimize their way of working. This article is the story of one R3 customer that our WinCenter software to built their foundation to support sustainable growth in the world of full and open.
The Situation
This customer is a 225 person GovCon firm providing scientific and technical services to defense and civilian agencies. They are moving from small business status to full and open competition in most areas. Their business development work including BD, capture and proposal work needed to be improved. The work was done in an ad-hoc fashion. People used various spreadsheets to track opportunities and work and used file shares and document systems (SharePoint and Teams in Office 365). All of the information was spread across the organization. And, the people were also distributed. In their weekly Pipeline review meetings they’d routinely spend 20 minutes just figuring out what source to start with. Their was no single view of the truth.
It was clear that the way that they were working would not support sustainable growth. It just wouldn’t scale. And, it was not really manageable in a programmatic way.
They wanted to consolidate the information from various tools and places, and the work, so that everyone would be “on the same page”. They wanted to have standard processes and be able to have a system to guide and drive these processes and best practices. They wanted the system to make it easier for their people to do the right things at the right time.
The initiative was driven by the COO as part of strengthening their BD operations to compete in the new full and open reality.
The Solution
They looked at multiple CRM systems notably Salesforce and Deltek CRM. They also looked at stand alone proposal systems. They really wanted a solution that would bring the work of BD, capture and proposal together into one system. They found R3 WinCenter. It brought all of the elements involved in winning GovCon business into a single solution. A key advantage of WinCenter is that it is designed to support GovCon best practices out-of-the-box. It supports elements such as Shipley/Lohfeld oriented GovCon BD phases, BD step/activity tracking, Gate Reviews, Color Reviews, Master Calendars, Knowledge Assets, Work Assignments, PWIN reporting, Fiscal Revenue Forecasting, Opportunity Assessments, and reporting and operational analytics.
In addition, they wanted to start small, quickly and easily. So, they decided to go with WinCenter in the R3 Cloud. This is our SaaS (software-as-a-service) offering where R3 customers can run 1 or more of our GovCon solutions within a single environment. Our R3 Cloud offerings have multiple levels of Federal Security Compliance (FedRamp, NIST, FIPS, ITAR, DoD SRg, etc.).
This customer was starting with WinCenter. And, initially they want to focus on the BD/Capture information and work. Then, they would add on the proposal development work.
To support this quick start approach, they choose to start with the R3 user pricing. As they grow they are able to flip into the R3 Tiered pricing. This allows them to have any number of users (internal and partners) within their Tier (size of organization). This supports spikes in personnel and broad collaboration.
The Result
They got up and running quickly. They had access to their environment in days. They then had 400 opportunities that they worked over the last 3 years migrated into the system. Instantly, all of that historical data lite up in the WinCenter reports. They then added the active opportunities. Within 3 weeks, the team was trained and up and running. By that time, they held their first online weekly Pipeline meeting. They were able to use WinCenter as their single system of record and review the opportunities phases. This quick transition to an online weekly meeting was a big win. Now, they were on the same page.
As a quick start approach, they learned to use the system out-of-the-box. Then, they figured out how they wanted to work together in the shared, collaborative system of WinCenter. Along the way they decided on changes to the system. Taking advantage of WinCenter’s flexibility these changes were able to be made quickly and easily.
The COO was very pleased with WinCenter and the implementation process saying, “We were able to use WinCenter out-of-the-box because it is built for Government Contractors. We are on the same page. And, using it we learned how to work together. Then, we were able to tweak WinCenter to match our evolving way of working. We are now in a much better position to compete as a team”.
About 9 months after the initial adoption, they were ready to migrate from their legacy proposal development system and bring that into WinCenter. The migration was done and they were trained for proposal development work. They then flipped into the R3 Tiered based licensing that dramatically decreases the cost of adding users including internal subject matter experts and external partners.
To learn more, visit the R3 WinCenter product page.