Winning Task Orders on IDIQs is challenging and competitive enough. But, it is extremely challenging and competitive in the construction industry. As a Prime General Contractor you have to work with a vast sea of construction subcontractors, locally based, to deliver bids that are won on lowest price technically acceptable terms.
This article will describe how one construction General Contractor leveraged R3’s Task Order software to optimize their proposal response work in order to bid more than 300 Task Orders in a single year and maximize the opportunity of their AEC MATOC Task Order business.
The Situation
The customer is a mid-tier division of a larger General Contracting construction firm. This division specializes in Federal Government construction projects. They do most of their business through specialty IDIQs referred to as AEC MATOCs (Architecture, Engineering, Construction (AEC), Multi-Award Task Order Contracts (MATOC)). The AEC category of Federal business historically is in the top 5 of all discretionary spending categories. The construction portion alone averages spending of $30 Billion per year.
They are a Prime on about 10 different AEC MATOCs. They had always managed this work manually. General Contractors have a different Task Order process because they need to work with a vast army of specialty subcontractors to get local bids for each element of the project. All of this GC bidding work needs to end up in a bid submitted on time and at lowest price to win.
The problem is that the Federal Government has a very big spike in AEC Task Orders at the end of their Fiscal Year. Our customer was not able to scale to meet the spike and maintain quality. At much as one-third of the opportunities that they could have bid just didn’t get bid or were bid under circumstances that jeopardized the quality (technical response, price, risk). They needed a way to automate the process, improve productivity and quality in order to be able to scale the business to bid more and win more.
They needed a special type of proposal management system to support the high volume and complexity of their AEC MATOC bids. It was envisioned that such a system would enable them to scale to meet the spike, capture more business, do it better, and of course beat the competition who would not be able to perform at this level.
The Solution
They landed upon R3’s Task Order Management software. This software solutions is specifically designed to support the challenges of bidding in high and spikey volumes and in bidding complex proposals that have unique Technical and Pricing sections.
The R3 solution provides the customer with the visibility of the full pipeline of Task Orders. And, it enables each Task Order to be worked on separately in its own secure workspace. The system is a work management system and streamlines and automates the work. For instance, it takes care of driving the workflow for writer and reviewer assignments and automatically updating statues to provide real time visibility into where the work standards.
The Result
Armed with the new R3 Task Order Management solution the customer charged into their busy season. It was able to bid all Task Orders that it selected to bid. It bid more than 300 Task Orders with 200 of them being bid in the last 30 days of the Government Fiscal year. This was a 40% increase in the bid amount.
This was accomplished without increasing management staff. This was possible because the system eliminated a great deal of manual and administrative work, distractions and gaps in awareness. This allowed the customer to stop wasting time and focus on the tasks on hand that made an impact.
Click here to learn more about the R3 Task Order Management software. If you are a General Contractor participating in AEC MATOCs you now have an off-the-shelf option that will enable you to optimize your capacity to bid Task Orders and power through spikes.
To see Task Order Factory in action, watch the video below.