This customer is a small business of rocket scientists that do the heavy thinking scientific work behind rockets. It is a 10 year old Federal Government Contractor. When they started with us in 2016 they were less than 70 employees. And, they wanted to really grow. As this story will explain they were able to leverage R3 WinCenter to double their revenues, by doubling their throughput of opportunities and submitted bids, without adding any new internal or external people.
The Challenge
It was your classic “Catch 22”. They had the talent. The market opportunity was there to grow. However, they didn’t have the resources in people and money to bid on the opportunities. In GovCon, every opportunity that you chase and bid on requires resources. It is an investment. And, it appears to be linear. So, you think that you need the money first to make the investment. Many small GovCon organizations can’t afford the money to invest in new people or external consultants to grow their business. So, they don’t or do it very incrementally.
Our customer’s champion was an experienced business development executive that had been brought into the company. He knew the situation. They were doing proposal work manually and it was burdensome. He wanted to move quickly to get the organization out of this sluggish situation. So, he was looking to use technology to provide him with leverage to grow the business and get around the “catch-22”.
In addition, he also knew that he had great Subject Matter Expert (SME) talent internally to be used in capture and proposal work. This latent talent was the fuel for the opportunity to grow. But, he needed the ability to tap into this talent and leverage it to increase the volume of opportunities that he pursued and the quality of the bids. He needed a different way of working to make this happen.
He also knew what would not work. He had experience using Microsoft SharePoint and legacy proposal management systems. They are all fundamentally just document management systems. They were fine for storing documents in folders. But, they provided no operational leverage. They didn’t change the game for getting the work done. Further, he knew that document management systems like these would be too cumbersome for his rocket scientists. He needed to be able to streamline and simplify their work in order to get them to participate.
The Solution
He found what he was looking for with R3 WinCenter. It is a flexible, work management solution built specifically to drive and manage capture and proposal work of Federal Government Contractors. It runs on top of Microsoft SharePoint and uses it to store its information. Yet, it provides an entirely different user experience that excels at driving, streamlining and automating the collaborative work.
The solution was purchased at the end of 2016 and the company proceeded to implement the solution in a “Quick Start” approach. This is where you basically use the solution out of the box and start working on proposals. You get started quickly as a team, then, as you learn together you modify the solution to meet your evolving needs. Thus, they were up and working within 2 weeks, at the beginning of 2017. Then, leveraging the built in wizards of R3 WinCenter, they were able to begin customizing the solution to optimize it to their evolving way of working.
They leveraged WinCenter for its basic capabilities. They used it to drive reuse of proposal assets. They used it to drive writer and reviewer work assignments. They used it to collaborate. They used it for color reviews and gate reviews. They leveraged it to automatically track and manage the opportunities and the status of all of the work. They relied on it to keep everyone informed with real time information.
The Result
They got going quickly and took off. The results for the 2017 calendar year were extraordinary. They more than doubled their total revenue and contract wins. During the year they worked on 275 opportunities. This was more than twice the number over the previous year. They submitted 66 proposals vs. just 25 proposals for the previous year. And, they did all of this without increasing internal proposal staff or using external consultants.
How were they able to do it? By leveraging WinCenter in two ways.
- First, proposal management staff productivity. They were able to double the volume of proposals and manage them with the same staff because the use of WinCenter dramatically eliminates the manual, administrative work of proposal managers. The system drives work assignments, supports collaborative work and keeps track of where everything is in process. It provides real time information. This makes it possible for proposal managers to each manage a portfolio of proposals and opportunities (pre or post proposal) without things falling through the cracks. So, the proposal team was able to more than double the amount of opportunities managed and proposals submitted while maintaining the same level of quality.
- Second, organizational Subject Matter Expert (SME) participation. This was the true game changer. Using WinCenter, the proposal group was able to double the number of people across the organization that participated in the writing and reviewing proposal work. They got many key holdouts to participate, contribute and help win. So, the participation went up but so did the quality of the proposals. It worked because WinCenter vastly simplifies what SME’s need to know and do in order to participate. It serves up to the user just the writing and reviewing work that needs to be done. This worked great for their rocket scientists who work best with structured tasks.
Combining these two elements meant that this firm was able to double their revenues in just one year. They got there because they doubled their throughput – without having to add people resources. This big boost in revenues has taken them to a new level. The company is now twice the size in revenues and employees. They believe that with WinCenter they now have a leveraged way of working that can be scaled to continue to grow the business.
In sum, what they did here really was not rocket science. They had been working manually. They dropped in a tool to provide them with leverage to optimize their way of working. It doubled their productivity, participation and throughput and brought their full A-team into the process. Now, they can take that optimized level of productivity and scale it with more people.
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