Visibility Across the Entire Business Development Lifecycle

One of the accepted best practices for winning Federal Government contracts is using a multi-phase process that tracks an opportunity from identification all the way through proposal submittal and award. Visibility into all the phases of the process—and into each opportunity in the process—is critical for making strategic bid decisions, managing resources, increasing efficiency, and winning more business.

About UTRS

Founded in 1985, Universal Technical Resource Services, Inc. (UTRS) provides engineering, technical, strategic, and digital services to the public and private sectors. Its key solution areas include supporting the warfighter, digital solutions, aviation safety, RDT&E, programmatic support, and civil engineering and corrosion control.

The WinCenter Solution

After careful consideration, UTRS invested in R3’s WinCenter for GovCon.  What initially caught UTRS’s eye was WinCenter’s ability to provide visibility across the entire BD lifecycle, being able to see things from Phase 1 all the way through Submittal and Award.  Before WinCenter, UTRS was using a different system, but it didn’t provide the visibility and robust capabilities that UTRS needed.

“We needed more visibility across the full BD lifecycle,” said Lowell Seward, Vice President of Contract Management at UTRS. “We wanted to see our opportunity pipeline from Phase 1 all the way through Submittal and Award.  R3’s WinCenter gives us that visibility.  It also gives us insights we weren’t getting before into our complete pipeline and all the individual opportunities.”

This visibility gives UTRS leadership real-time views into the pipeline, with the ability to drill down by Phase or into individual opportunities. Such access and information allow leaders to make more-informed decisions at both the strategic and tactical levels.

Integration with GovWin IQ

UTRS’s WinCenter implementation integrates with Deltek’s GovWin IQ, giving UTRS the ability to directly import opportunities from GovWin into WinCenter. Once an opportunity is imported, the system will continue to sync the information and documents to ensure the latest updates are always available in the WinCenter opportunity record.

“We found the integration with GovWin to be extremely valuable,” said Andrea Hearing, Proposal Development Director at UTRS. “We actually leverage this two ways:  One, if we already have the opp in WinCenter, we can sync it to GovWin to continually pull in the GovWin data and information, and two, if we see an opp in GovWin that we want to track, we can push it directly into WinCenter.  This allows us to still leverage the value of GovWin, but now to see it integrated within the system.”

Everything in One Place

One of the biggest productivity drivers for UTRS is that everything associated with the BD lifecycle is in one place.  All information, data, and documents related to an opportunity are contained in one record in the system.

“We feed all capture data right into the opportunity—teaming information, intel, draft RFP/SOW, everything,” said Hearing. “And since we also sync with GovWin, all the documents and GovWin information is there, too.  The benefit is that it’s all together in one record.  Everything is there.”

Another big benefit, according to Hearing, is that as an opportunity moves through the phases, everything—data, information, documents—goes with it.  Then, once an award is announced, UTRS will archive the opportunity. It’s still available with all its information, but not part of the visible pipeline or any reporting. She said nothing ever gets deleted, so there is an historic record for all opportunities.

Controlled Access

UTRS has a core group of users who are involved in most proposals, including the proposal development team, contracts, and BD. But each opportunity also has a unique set of teammates and internal SMEs who are working on it. Being able to control who has access to specific information is critical.

“The controlled access works really well.  I love that we can give people access to only those things we want them to see,” said Hearing. “This control is critical, especially with external teammates. Once we submit a proposal, we simply deactivate their access.  We do the same with our internal SMEs. We don’t want to complicate it by having them see everything. We want to limit it to what they are working on.”

Getting Work Done

According to Hearing, there are several other features of WinCenter that just make it faster and easier to get the work done. These include some of the workflow features, like the process of reviewing documents. Instead of sending around the actual document, the system provides links to the documents where reviewers go to complete their review. This ensures there aren’t multiple versions of any document circulating at the same time.  The versioning provided by the system is important, too, as is the ability to do co-commenting. The asset library, too, is a great resource for proposal writers.

“These features are huge time savers,” said Hearing. “It just makes the work simpler and easier for everyone.”