Proposal Centres
Your proposal centre – physical facility or WFH?
With a proposal centre – whether it’s a physical or virtual facility – you centralise proposal and tender preparation and production, sharing and propagating best practice for everyone involved. Done well, your proposal centre will enhance accuracy, quality and compliance in your proposals and improve efficiency and knowledge-sharing across your organisation.
So, what will your proposal centre deliver and how do you make the best of the new business world with working from home embedded into many corporate operations? The basics are:
- A secure, confidential environment for the bid team with access to best practice bid support tools, libraries, materials and services
- Added value to your bids through expert bid planning and storyboarding; theme and content development; bid and presentation writing; proof-reading, editing and reviewing; compiling and updating best practice libraries; ensuring compliance with corporate legal, commercial, quality and presentation standards.
- Depending on the type and volumes of bids produced, proposal centres can incorporate dedicated or outsourced production facilities.
Kitting out a physical space? A proposal centre can range from a simple meeting room equipped with enhanced facilities to support bid teams, through to dedicated high-tech custom-designed facilities with production and collation rooms, contract libraries, kitchen and shower-rooms! We’ve site surveyed, spec’d, designed, commissioned and fitted out all different types of facility, so do ask our expert team how to make the best of any space you want to use. With our construction and facilities management partners we can help you devise and implement a targeted proposal centre facility strategy.
If physical facilities aren’t practicable or necessary for your bidding environment, and working from home (WFH) is central, then your proposal centre can be a really excellent virtual service. You can give your users centralised Intranet portals with updated libraries and repositories of best practice materials, guidelines and tools for high quality bid production. Our team has wide-ranging experience in setting up these services and can advise on best practice in compiling and updating all the materials and supporting tools you need.
Whichever way you set it up, your proposal centre can work on two levels. It can simply be about centralising content creation resources and production, taking away from the bid manager the responsibility of worrying about content sourcing, bid production and delivery. This enables bid managers and subject matter experts to focus on their core skills: developing the messages and content for the bid, improving efficiency and productivity. Beyond that, your proposal centre can focus on delivering added-value services, enhancing the quality of the proposal and client presentation and helping to develop bid management and bid support skills.
Helping define what you need – business case, ROI, value
If you are not sure which type of facility or service to implement for your environment, we can help with business case preparation and assessment of ROI and longer term value assessments.
Management and staff for your Centre – selection, induction, training and development
The Bid Dynamics team can also support you with:
- Proposal Centre manager and staff selection and induction, including placing interim staff to support you through the process of building your team.
- Preparation of job descriptions and induction programmes
- Proposal Centre manager and staff training and development, including document management training
- Bid manager and bid team training and development programmes.
Relevant, accurate, up-to-date libraries to support your proposals
The key point about library information, whether on-line or in hard copy, is that you need a cohesive strategy for verifying the validity and currency of the information. It is not sufficient to provide ‘last update’ dates: a document may be old but still current and valid. It needs to have been verified by the ‘owner’ as being accurate and up-to-date, so that users can rely on it. We can develop the most appropriate approach for you depending on the type of information your users need, and the associated review and update requirements. This can range from corporate qualification materials for PQQs and early stage bids through to technical and performance data, case studies, success stories and reference site information, all of which may need validation or account manager approval before being re-used in new bids.
Contact us today for a confidential discussion about the type of help you need to set up or enhance your proposal centre or proposal support organisation. You’ll reach us by phone on 07876 228 254 or send an enquiry through our Contact page and we will call you.
