By design, most software vendors assume that their customers will use their software in the same way. This is not the case when it comes to GovCon capture and proposal (“C&P”) management. There are some obvious reasons for this. Organizations are at different phases of their lifecycle, they have different approaches, processes and technology, and, their sense of the need and the ability to get organizational and user adoption differs.
WinCenter is designed differently. It is designed to be flexible and is built bottom up to support it. WinCenter’s flexibility enables customers to have it their way and to follow their own path for getting there. In this article I’ll summarize a few customer situations and provide you with links to the specific customer case studies that demonstrate the importance of flexibility to our customers' success.
WinCenter Out of the Box – Quick Starting Organizations into a Structured Way of Working
Some organizations are at the point where they need to formalize their processes in order to compete effectively and scale. Generally, these are smaller GovCon organizations moving towards full and open competition.
This case study, Graduating 8(a) Small Business Prepares for Growth and Open Competition, is about a 150 person organization in just such as a situation. They basically adopted WinCenter out of the box, including the standard Capture and Proposal process, and got to work right away on proposals and opportunities. Their approach was to get started quickly, adopting existing processes, and then, leverage the flexibility of WinCenter to accommodate their needs as they evolve and the organization matures.
WinCenter for Customized Process
Larger organizations tend to have a documented C&P process. Their main challenge is to get their people to follow the process. They use WinCenter to drive and guide this process consistency and automate the work of the users.
In this case study, Changing WinCenter to Accommodate Your Process, an 800 person division of a Tier 1 GovCon organization, had developed a very custom process and methodology that they wanted to implement. It differed from the industry standard and was more of a customer facing solution selling model. WinCenter was able to flex to meet their needs at a much more acceptable cost and time frame than the alternatives.
Enhancing WinCenter to Drive Cross-Organizational Processes
Once organizations have a standardized capture and proposal management system, they are then ready to go further and start to standardize and automate their related cross-organizational processes. WinCenter along with R3 Add-Ons such as My Work Business Processes support this evolution.
A 350 person company started out with WinCenter at their core primarily for opportunity/capture management. You can read about their initial experience in the article, $50m Government Contractor Uses WinCenter to Drive Integrated Capture Management.
With the release of R3’s My Work Business Process solution in 2015, they began to automate their supporting business processes. The first process was their Bid & Proposal Budget Management process. You can read about this process in the article, Automating the Bid & Proposal Budget Request Process Using R3 My Work. It is a closed-loop process that starts with a WinCenter opportunity, engages users/departments across the organization to do their work, and then, closes out by updating WinCenter. This customer is now moving on to the next processes which are a Gate Review process and various contract processes. Each new process brings additional value as the organization aligns on their unique way of working and then puts it in place.
Do your tools help you move forward or constrain you?
This is an important question. Most legacy tools are proprietary (to the vendor) and designed to work in just one way. WinCenter recognizes the need for flexibility and is designed from the bottom up to support it. Fundamentally, if you intend to get better over time, you require software that can flex and extend to meet your changing needs.
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