In my first post, I provided an intro to R3 and our focus on business solutions for Federal Government Contractors. In this post, I’ll drill down a bit deeper to talk about our solution categories and specific business solutions.
Our business solutions serve what we call “the soft center of the GovCon workplace”. They are for work management. This is where the day-to-day work gets done. Work management solutions are typically process oriented, involving collaborative work and are natural to run on top of SharePoint. Often, our solutions then connect out to database applications such as an organizations’ financial system, their CRM (customer relationship management) or HR systems.
R3 solutions are grouped into three distinct buckets: Win, Deliver and Manage.
- Win solutions – help you to win business
- Deliver solutions – help you to deliver the work
- Manage solutions – are for supporting departments and activities
When you think about Government Contractor work, the business critical work (the businesses critical path of revenue and profits), is to win contracts and deliver the contracted work. These two parts form the core of the business. Then, there are lots of supporting activities across the organization that are necessary in themselves, and often, supporting Winning or Delivering. Together, these form the three core solution areas of R3. This is depicted in the above graphic.
Below, I’ll drill down into each solution category. Note that our approach to the solutions in each category differs as each has its different needs. However, unlike other vendors, each of our solutions runs on the same R3 open application platform. This means that they are lower cost, more flexible, natively integrated, and, supportable as if they were one solution.
Win Solutions
In this area we provide two solutions: Lohfeld WinCenter for Capture and Proposal Management and CorasWorks IDIQ Task Order Management. These solutions are developed by partners and R3 implements them. We know them well as we have had a hand in the development of each of them. They both run on the standardized open application platform that R3 also uses – meaning CorasWorks on SharePoint. Together, these two solutions cover the two main areas of winning business today which is a) the core business acquisition process of responding to RFPs and b) support for the IDIQ Task Order response process.
A key part of these solutions is the ability to implement them in a customized manner. They tend to be very process centric. The flexibility of the open application platform allows us to implement them how the customer wants it. The two solutions integrate and we do this in different ways depending on the needs of the customer. Each solution includes Partner engagement and we often blend the two solutions to have integrated Partner Engagement and also integrated Knowledge Asset libraries.
In addition, we are able to enhance the solutions. This means that we can add new features. You don’t have to wait for the vendor to meet your needs. They can be enhanced without any code development so that any updates in the open application platform are still supported. Some standard R3 enhancements are Financial Spreading, custom Pwin calculations, and extending Partner Engagement to include Post-Award activities. We also provide add-ons to these solutions such as Account Management for WinCenter and Customer Portals for IDIQ.
Deliver Solutions
Our Deliver solutions are all based upon an R3 “Program Management” framework. This off-the-shelf framework focuses on managing the contracts/programs and the “soft” work of the program. Examples of work are managing changes and amendments to contracts, managing CDRL reporting (Customer Data Requirements List), managing your program status updates, and managing subcontractor activity, data calls and reporting. This type of work differs from the more common solutions from other vendors for classic project management. Those solutions are oriented to managing the detailed tasks accordingly to a project plan. We leave that to the vast set of tools already at your disposal. And, we integrate with them where required.
In sum, we see our Deliver solutions as addressing a very specific and important need of GovCon that is not well served by existing vendors – the job of the Contract/Program Manager. The many details of work that have to be managed is overwhelming for most PM’s and if they get it all covered it is usually either tremendously hard work or luck. This puts programs and organizations at risk. Our solutions address these needs and empowers the PM.
Manage Solutions
Our third area consists of the point solutions used by specific teams in various departments. The challenge is to cost-effectively have applications that a departmental or team manager can use to better organize the work of their team. The objective is to be more productive, more responsive to others, and, to reduce the risk of items being missed or lost. Two examples of solutions in this category are Subcontractor Administration and HR Request Management. If you look at both applications, they are situations where a team (or person) gets lots of requests from across the organization. Today, in almost all cases these requests come via email. It is very difficult to a) not miss items, b) track the progress, and c) securely control and manage the resulting documents. These solutions funnel the requests into a single application where the manager/team/person can better manage the work.
In most organizations, the work covered by Manage solutions is still via email and spreadsheet. The reason is that the needs of these groups don’t get top billing and the cost of addressing their needs has been prohibitive. With R3, these solutions are now off-the-shelf, flexible and very cost-effective providing a quick return on investment and quick reduction in risk of things falling through the cracks.
A Value Proposition That Keeps Getting Better
Each solution that we provide can be deployed stand-alone to deliver its value. However, remember that they all run on a common open application platform. This means that they can be natively integrated. It means that you can add new solutions incrementally. It means that you only pay for the cost of the platform once and each solution is just an incremental cost. You can also add your own solutions leveraging the same platform. You are able to customize and enhance the solutions on your own. And, you can integrate any of these solutions with other applications or resources in SharePoint.
The fundamental idea of our approach is that once you have your first R3 solution, your costs continue to go down for each additional solution. There are no per user fees for our solutions – just one perpetual license fee for each. So, your investment in your platform is leveraged across your solutions. As you add more solutions and standardize your way of working your costs go down and the business value goes up. It is kind of that simple.
For more information about R3 Solutions, see the Solution section of our website.
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