A 5,000 person Clinical Research Organization was looking to create a new system for Global Proposal Operations. It would be a global system to manage proposal work on more than 1,000 proposals per year. Their proposals are complex responses to RFPs that often have multiple iterations. They also wanted the system to be integrated with Salesforce.
With enterprise systems such as this it is a tough call to decide whether to build something from scratch or to use an off the shelf solution. With modern platforms there are now choices in between. This is the story of how they were able to tap R3 WinCenter Enterprise to meet their needs at a fraction of the cost, time and risk of custom development.
The Challenge
A mid-sized, global Clinical Research Organization (CRO) was looking to create a new system for Global Proposal Operations. The purpose of the system was to standardize their global processes and information resources in order to drive better win results and increased productivity. The need became even more critical with the announcement of an acquisition that doubled the size of the organization. It was an opportune time to create one system.
Up until this time, the CRO was using a customized Microsoft SharePoint system for proposals. This system primarily served as a proposal document repository. While the organization had processes on paper, all of the actual work was driven, tracked, managed and done manually using personal productivity tools such as Email, Excel, Word and PowerPoint. The vision was to take their process from paper and put it into practice embedded in a software system. The system would support their process, drive the work, streamline and automate the work and provide real time reporting and visibility. This system would be used for their proposals that were complex, multi-million dollar, and, often involved multiple iterations. In addition, their vision involved integrating the resulting Proposal Operations system with the corporate Salesforce system that was used to track opportunities.
Given the complex and custom requirements they had initially only considered the options of custom development on top of SharePoint or building the system from scratch. Both of these options were very expensive and entailed a great amount of risk. They were looking for a way to meet the needs that would not have the cost and risk.
The Solution
They found R3 WinCenter®. It is a work management system designed to support proposal development processes for complex RFP responses by Federal Government Contractors. The default process and target market is different from Clinical Research Organizations. However, there were four reasons why WinCenter Enterprise was a good fit for this CRO.
- Both industries are working on complex RFP response processes and are working in document-based proposal environments. This means that the work involves working with documents (Word, Excel, PDF, graphics, etc.) vs. a data-driven environment such as pure questions or quotes.
- Further, WinCenter Enterprise is designed to be changed to accommodate custom processes and work management needs. It is built using R3’s open and flexible application platform. This means that most parts of the system can be customized and modified without doing any custom code development. Thus, it offered a the alternative of an off-the-shelf proposal management system that was also designed to be customized to an organizations processes and work management needs.
- In addition, the R3 WinCenter system literally runs on top of Microsoft SharePoint. Users would never know it because the user experience is simple, streamlined and process oriented (vs. content centric like native SharePoint). Yet, the data is all stored within SharePoint which means that the Microsoft SharePoint data and security model would be supported. This reduced any platform risk. Also, it meant that the system could be deployed on-premise or in a private cloud environment controlled by the CRO.
- Part of the R3 WinCenter Enterprise platform is an open, integration framework that allows it to connect to external systems such as Salesforce, custom databases or other systems.
The CRO customer began with R3 WinCenter Enterprise in its out-of-the-box configuration. They then went through requirements and configuration changes in an agile approach. In addition, the implementation used the R3 Salesforce connector to map their two-way synchronization between their corporate Salesforce instance and R3 WinCenter running on SharePoint.
The Result
The complete system was delivered to the requirements within 10% of the original budget. The budget for this system including software and services was less than 1/3rd of the cost proposed to them for the alternative custom systems. The system began with 1,600 opportunities being managed. The system is used by more than 300 global users working on more than 1,000 proposals and iterations of proposals each year.
The system is setup up to synchronize with Salesforce on a timed basis. No user interaction is required. Further, with the open, flexible design of WinCenter the CRO is able to maintain the system and continue to evolve the system on its own with standard maintenance and support from R3.
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