It’s hard to take time out to evaluate and improve your tender management practices, especially when under pressure to win bids. But ignoring ongoing challenges and inefficiencies will only continue to hinder your company’s ability to win more valuable contracts.
Often taking the first step is the hardest, which is why we have published a new innovative tool, the ‘Bid Journey Challenges: Interactive Evaluation & Improvement Workbook’, to help you on your way.
In this article we provide an overview of using the workbook to more easily assess your bid journey challenges and establish priorities for a phased improvement plan.
Benefits of Using the Workbook
This workbook, the first of its kind for this industry, provides a useful tool to undertake a comprehensive review of your bid management practices and activities.
It has been designed using the TenderEyes Team’s first-hand tender management expertise and experience, together with insights from long-standing client relationships with top-tier organisations.
The workbook forms part of our wider best practice resources focused on helping our customers achieve world-class tender success. Benefits of the workbook include :
- A logical, comprehensive process for challenge evaluation
- Auto-calculate and auto-populate fields for quicker, easier assessment
- A collaborative tool to allow all stakeholders to contribute to the evaluation process
- Informed decision making for a phased improvement plan
- A strong foundation to kick-start discussions and evaluation of potential bid management software.
1. Understanding the Bid Journey
The workbook takes you through a logical step-by-step process to comprehensively evaluate each stage of your bid journey.
The bid journey encompasses several critical stages, each with unique objectives and potential pitfalls. As outlined in the workbook, these stages are as indicated in the below diagram.
Each stages requires meticulous planning, robust processes, and effective collaboration to ensure successful outcomes.
For each stage of the bid journey, we have a Summary Page detailing the high-level objective, main challenges and impacts (as below) plus a list of key activities and teams involved.
A. Plan Strategies
- Challenge: Access to comprehensive data for informed analysis and insight to develop robust bidding strategies aligned with high-level business objectives.
- Impact: Poor strategic planning can lead to misinformed decisions, inefficient resource allocation and missed best-fit opportunities.
B. Source Opportunities
- Challenge: Delivering effective and consistent identification and qualification of best-fit tender opportunities.
- Impact: Failure to target the right opportunities can result in wasted efforts on low-probability bids and reduced win rates.
C. Manage Knowledge
- Challenge: Organising, managing and updating vast amounts of tender-related information and documentation.
- Impact: Valuable time wasted searching for content and potential of expired, inaccurate or low-quality content within tender submissions. Resulting in low win probabilities and higher reputational and financial risks.
D. Compile Submissions
- Challenge: Delays, poor project management and collaboration in creating comprehensive, high-quality tender submissions under tight deadlines.
- Impact: Incomplete or poorly constructed submissions can significantly diminish your chances of winning bids.
E. Results & Review
- Challenge: Visibility and analysis of project activities, performance and results as well as securing feedback for ongoing continuous improvement.
- Impact: Processes remain inefficient, teams miss out on learning opportunities and tender submission quality remains stagnant.
F. Deliver Contracts
- Challenge: Ensuring smooth handover and delivery of awarded contracts to agreed terms, schedules and budgets.
- Impact: Poor contract delivery can harm client relationships and affect future bidding prospects.
2. Identifying Key Bid Journey Challenges
We then delve into the main purpose of the workbook – namely to identify key challenges at each bid stage. This can be a difficult and lengthy exercise if starting from scratch.
However, we have listed the most common challenges experienced at each stage of the bid journey.
You can also include your own unique challenges as part of the evaluation.
On each Challenges Evaluation page, challenge scores are automatically calculated for use further in the workbook.
3. Prioritising Bid Journey Improvements
Identifying, potentially, numerous challenges for your whole bid journey can feel overwhelming. This is the reason we break the assessment down into bid journey stages and then look to set priorities.
Having completed each Bid Stage Challenges Evaluation page (or as many of the stages you are focusing on), we turn to the Improvement Priorities Ranking Worksheet. This automatically populates with your total challenge scores for each of the bid stages.
You can now set your priority rankings for each bid stage, with for example, the highest scoring bid challenges being ranked as No.1 and so on. You may have matching total scores for a couple of the bid stages. You can either rank them the same or go back and review your challenge evaluations and make amendments.
The last page of the evaluation workbook allows you to pick your Top 3 Priority Bid Stages for improvement. By leveraging the insights gained from the workbook, you can take the next steps to developing a phased improvement plan to enhance your bidding practices, improve efficiency, and ultimately increase your win rates.
4. Leveraging the TenderEyes Solution
A significant element of your developing your improvement plans will be to assess your current tender management support tools and technology. As well as explore new ways of working and new technologies.
As well as working as an internal evaluation tool the workbook on how the TenderEyes Bid Management solution can help support your planned improvements.
- Challenges Evaluation Pages: demonstrates clear resolutions to each challenge that can be achieved by adopting the TenderEyes solution.
- Top Priorities Page: indicates the relevant core TenderEyes Module that supports each stage of the Bid Journey.
The workbook results will provide a good foundation for discussions you choose to have with the TenderEyes Team to explore our software further. The insights gained will help us better understand and address your business needs and challenges.
Watch Short Workbook Overview Video
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