“The best way to win a bid is to write the request for quotation”. A worthy objective but in reality this rarely happens. Bidding for business continues to be an essential yet challenging component of many companies’ sales processes. This is especially true in the automotive industry where suppliers must cope with constantly changing customer demand, increasing local and global competition and the escalating needs and complexities of today’s vehicles and their design and manufacturing processes.
The disconnected, less than ideal (often manual) bid processes of today, coupled with the many forces that drive cost and inaccuracy into offers means that companies must continue to look at new ways to deliver more profitable, accurate, timely, and differentiating proposals. And this needs to be done without adverse effect on the costs of the bidding process and, of course, the bandwidth of their people.
Understanding the big picture
In most suppliers, a bid rarely exists in isolation. It forms one of many, potentially thousands of offers made by the company. If that’s the case, shouldn’t one look at any new request in the context of the business as a whole? Does it fit to what the company does, have they done thinks like this before, will all resources be available to propose and deliver, were last bids profitable and who might be the competition and what might they offer? Of course, consolidating these types of information and displaying them in a manner that makes it easy to make informed choices helps to answer these questions.
Re-use is everything
When it comes to developing a bid one must take into account the company’s rate and capacity to design, engineer and cost a compelling offer. Making more effective use of what’s successfully been done in the past means bid team members can focus on areas where they add value; and it reduces bid risk and saves time. Having easy and immediate access to existing designs for example, helps reduce bid development costs and ensures the viability and performance of the final offer.
Mastering complexity
Of course there are many choices that need to be made during the bid process. Using good judgment and well-informed decisions reduces bid risk and offers the best chance of a winning offer. By aggregating and efficiently rationalizing complex information in areas such as technical compliance, timescales, resource allocations, costs and profitability allows bid teams to make best decisions early. The use of dynamic management dashboards helps to understand situations and choices in the context of the bid and against the company’s key performance criteria, allowing the bid team to audit and adapt instantly should change be necessary.
Connecting the dots
A disconnected environment reduces efficiency and can be the root cause of many bid-related errors. Connecting the information, people and places for example sales, purchasing and engineering functions, enables the reuse of information and helps to standardize business processes. Ultimately this delivers more accurate and performing offers. Importantly, by using technology to unify the bid process around a commonly accessible and managed environment, necessities such as bid and company governance, reporting and measurement are available as a result; on demand, in time, and accurately.
youtu.be/HwWpTrMo-A0 Creating a winning impression
On a final note, the final bid deliverable is often overlooked as an opportunity to differentiate, promote and excel. Of course it’s essential that final output be performing, correct to specification and presentable. With the availability of the bid information including computer models produced as a by-product of an integrated bid development process, why stop at printed output or a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation? Demonstrating the form, fit and function of the final offer in context, in motion (in 3D) or even interactively, allows suppliers to emphasize differentiating attributes of their bid in a format that’s easy to understand and attractive to the customer. As is often said, a picture paints a thousand words; immersing oneself in the virtual 3D world paints a million.
The way forward?
The disconnected, (often manual) processes of old can’t deliver the tangible improvements that many companies aspire to in their bid processes; but there is opportunity to improve. Given the challenges facing companies that bid to win, and the prospects offered by an integrated bid management environment, there’s prospect to do better?
