Bid and Proposals
During the bid phase, executives and sales teams have a good sense for what it takes to win. Engineering and operations can calculate what it takes to execute. Our solution brings the two together to allow your company to bid with confidence and then execute to achieve your profitability targets.
Change the Way you Win
Price-to-Win & Design-to-Cost
PTW and DTC are powerful concepts - when used in our solutions we can help bring your sales and operations teams together, and ensure bids & proposals reflect both what the customer wants and what the customer wants to pay, while quoting prices where you can generate profits.
Proposals are structured based on WBS, CLINs, Phases, Options and the product indenture or BOM. We keep track of the relationships between all these hierarchies.
Requirements Traceability
Any proposal needs to be anchored in the customer's requirements. With our solution, you can choose to integrate requirements from DOORS, upload them from a spreadsheet or manually maintain them. They are then linked to their respective WBS elements and flowed through to your Basis of Estimates for full requirements traceability.
Basis of Estimates
Basis of Estimates (BOE) are managed centrally, but distributed to BOE owners from around the world, ensuring central governance and control, while gaining input from all your key stakeholders. These BOE's are tied to workflows to ensure timely completion and approval against your pursuit schedule.
BOE's can be maintained on any level in of your proposal WBS, in any currency, and can contain estimates for all types of cost, such as Labor, Material, Travel, Sub-contracts, ODC, Indirect etc.
Cost Model
Once BOE's have been completed, our solution gives you a time-phased cost model for review. Data can be sliced and diced in any dimension and all types of factors can be applied.
What-if simulations can be performed and multiple cost model versions stored. Challenges can be created for BOE owners in order to get your cost model where it needs to be, while keeping engineering and operations still on the hook for delivery cost targets.
Teamwork & Collaboration
During a bid, there are tight timelines and lots of people need to provide input. It is essential that data flows efficiently, feeding into a single cost model, and that the status of all aspects of the bid are crystal clear.
Our solution provides workflow to drive efficiency and overall status monitoring to ensure that timelines are met. We also handle global collaboration, with multi-currency, multi-entity and multi-language support.
Risks & Opportunities
We believe managing risk and opportunities starts during the proposal phase; that way you can consider them when you calculate your risk-adjusted cost and factor them in as you are negotiating terms. Maybe some risks can be transferred to your customer or to a supplier? Maybe they can be completely avoided by changing a certain proposal line item into cost plus?
Tracking and managing risks, issues & opportunities from the proposal phase also establishes a risk/management reserve for the program, to help you manage project risks as you move into execution.
Pricing & Negotiation
When you understand your cost model, including accuracy, standard deviation and confidence in your estimates, when you understand the specific risks that can derail the project and when you know what your customer wants, you can price your bid.
You will be in a more powerful position when you sit around the negotiation table, knowing where to give and where to stay firm to mitigate risks while maximizing your profit.
Reporting
Being able to understand the details of your estimate is critical for both you and your customers. Our solution comes with pre-defined reports around risk-adjusted costs, cost element breakdowns, cashflow reports for hedging and NPV calculations and the list goes on. Furthermore, data can easily be exported to Excel for further analysis or reported on directly with tools such as SAP Business Objects or SAP Analytics Cloud.
Designed on SAP HANA for organizations running SAP
Our solution takes full advantage of SAP's powerful HANA database and is natively integrated with SAP to re-use master data already maintained in SAP such as resource pools, BOM's, items, routings, vendors, etc. At the same time we leverage and reference your rich transaction history sitting in SAP, such as quotes, contracts, purchase orders and production orders, to anchor estimates in reality.
That said, we know that even long-time SAP customers still have non-SAP data sources that are critical for the bid & proposal process; such as DOORS, Primavera, Salesforce, etc. Don't worry, we've got your covered.
When it comes to deployment, we have added flexibility to fit into your specific landscape and security requirements. The solution is architected to allow for several deployment scenarios, such as directly in your S/4 HANA instance, in an on-premise HANA sidecar, or in the cloud, all the time being ITAR compliant.
Don't Hesitate
We’re happy to hear from you. Contact us today to learn more about what we can offer.