Fast growing GovCon organizations hit the point where their growth dictates the need for more formal systems to support their continued growth and quality of business operations. A critical need for GovCon are the core business departments of BD (winning), Contracts (managing contracts) and Program Management (managing delivery). This customer success story describes how one GovCon firm addressed these core needs by adopting the core solution set of the R3 GovCon Suite.
The Situation
A 150-person defense contractor in Huntsville, Alabama was winning contracts and growing revenue rapidly. Their CEO and COO were aligned on the need to strengthen the core parts of their business by adding more formal systems. They wanted to improve how they win the business, how they manage the contracts and how they manage the delivery of the contracts and programs. These are what they consider to be the “business critical” parts of their business.
They had been successful at winning the business and delivering to build their base business. However, they did not have formal systems for their “business critical” work. The work was done ad-hoc using spreadsheets, file shares, email and other personal productivity tools. Like many GovCon organizations, they had tools for the front-end opportunities and for the back-end finance, but they lacked formal systems for the core business critical work in the middle of their GovCon workstream.
They wanted a system for contract management that was designed to support Government Contractors. And, they wanted a solution that would enable them to manage the delivery of programs so things didn’t fall through the cracks. They wanted to be able to standardize their BD process and the work of capture and proposal development. And, ideally they wanted these departmental systems (BD, Contracts, Program Management) to work together. They wanted one source of the truth accessable in real time.
They looked at CRM systems for BD but they didn’t reflect the GovCon BD process. Then, they looked at some document management systems for proposal work. They looked at contract management systems but they were all designed for firms selling to commercial vs. Federal. And, when looking for something for Program Management, most systems were really project management tools. In sum, this approach would just lead to siloed tools, each with proprietary data/documents, most having to run on the vendors SaaS environments, and each would have to be extensively customized to work for a GovCon business like theirs.
The Solution
To their surprise, they found R3 Business Solutions and the R3 GovCon Suite. The Suite is a set of business solutions that are built specifically for Federal Government Contractors. They address the “business critical” work in the middle of the GovCon workstream. They run within a single environment and work together. The R3 solutions for this customer were as follows:
- R3 WinCenter – for BD, Capture and Proposal management (Win)
- R3 Contract Management – to manage the contracts and subcontracts (Manage)
- R3 Program Management – to manage the delivery of the programs/contracts/task orders (Deliver)
Each solution serves the needs of a single department and the users that are involved in the work across the organization. And, the solutions all work together with sharing of information as it happens in the real world between these departments. The R3 GovCon Suite solutions form the middle section of the GovCon workstream between the front-end opportunities and the back-end finance system. The image below depicts the standard GovCon workstream as adopted by this customer.
The middle area of the GovCon workstream involves collaboration, data and rich document management, controlled access to information, business processes and workflow and creative work. For GovCon it is the business critical work. It must be done well for the organization to continue to thrive. With the R3 solutions they could quickly jump into a more formal system. Each solution already incorporated GovCon best practices. Each department manager would have their own solution but they would all be part of one system. And, with the extensive flexibility of the R3 GovCon Suite, they would be able to modify the solutions and the overall system as they desire over time.
The Result
The customer elected to deploy the system in a private cloud environment, Amazon Web Services, so that they would have full control over it. The customer took a phased, serial approach to implementation starting with Contracts, then Programs, and lastly WinCenter. The full system was up and running within a week for the various business users to learn and work with. The implementation was serial and lasted about 2 months per solution. For each solution they migrated information into the system to create a single “source of truth” for the organization. Then, they worked with the solution and came up with changes to reflect their evolving way of working. The full implementation took 6 months as scheduled.
The COO was very pleased with the implementation saying, “What is great is that you can start by using the R3 GovCon Suite out-of-the-box. It already incorporates the GovCon best practices. Then, as we figured out how we wanted to work together we just tweaked the R3 solutions. We are now up and running and improving how we work together all the time. We have one source of truth with real time access.”
All R3 solutions share a common work management platform that comes with wizards that enable organizations to custom tailor each solution and how they work with each other. So, customer’s like this one are able to use the system out-of-the-box and then they are able to custom tailor it to fit their needs over time.
This organization has very rapidly moved from an ad-hoc way of working to a more formal system. The information and work has structure. It incorporates GovCon best practices. And, it automates the work for people to make is easier for them to do what needs to be done. The organization can now scale its business, and do so more productively and with less risk. As the COO says, “it is remarkable that the R3 GovCon Suite exists. It is exactly what we needed to drop in place to have a solid foundation for continued growth.”
To learn more about the R3 GovCon Suite and the solutions that are available, see the R3 GovCon Suite overview page.