Everyone, who has ever taken part in tenders, knows, that amount of work dedicated to prepare the offer may discourage. If it a one-time tender, we approach it as a regular project, demanding a little bit more work and after it’s ending (hopefully successful) we try to forget, how much overtime we’ve made. But what if participating in tenders in our everyday job? How can we increase effectivity of offer preparation?
Searching for new tenders
As a company providing and servicing mining equipment and machines, we respond to inquiries about demethanation devices for mines or delivery of spare parts for roadheaders. Information about tenders arrive to our e-mail account from many sources. Thanks to an Excel add-in, we are able to import them quickly to the spreadsheet. Thanks to that, Jerry, instead of reading tons of e-mails, may open the sheet with list of potentially interesting tenders, acknowledging their basic information. After a moment he will be able to reject proceedings concerning explosive materials for mines and focus on equipment servicing. Whenever any tender seems interesting to him, by using one button he will be able to import detailed information to the Excel file. After reading the description carefully, Jerry will know if a tender is noteworthy. If it is – he will import it to CRM.
Tracking the progress
Import to CRM means creating record of a Potential tender. Jerry will not make the final decision, if his company will take part, by doing it. The system will assign Potential tender to record of the customer. By analysing history of cooperation with the customer, Baldwin can make a decision if he is interested in this particular cooperation. If he knows, that customer announces tender for much bigger volume than is further to be realized, he may decide not to take part.
Baldwin never enters Jerry’s Excel file. He does not visit webpages with announcements on tenders. Once upon a time he did that – he used to copy all the information from sites to his own spreadsheet. Right now he uses CRM. Every worthwhile tender has its place on the list of Potential tenders. If Baldwin decides upon participating in tender, he converts a Potential tender into Tender record. It will be easier for him to find all the Tenders that are being processed in our company. He will be able to prepare reports and analyse data based for example on a sales funnel.
The CRM system will gather information not only about the requirements set out in the Terms of Reference, the start and end dates of the tender, or the date of opening bids. Baldwin will see what steps have been taken and what else has to be prepared to create an offer in the system. He will be able to delegate his tasks to his employees – for example to prepare a quote for a customer.
Preparing quote for customer
Quote preparation is the key moment when developing an offer. At this point, we calculate the value of our order and evaluate our chances of winning. There are few responsible for the evaluation and cost calculations. We have a team of few persons that take part in evaluation offer – each of them takes his time to independently assess all the costs of products and services. Tendersys allows us to prepare valuations depending on the value given by different employees.
Thanks to Tendersys, we can access historical data on prices of goods and services. Tendersys stores data on contract costs, history of our and competitive pricing, and on winning price in the database. With this information our evaluating team will be able to better tailor the offer to the market conditions.
The system also monitors quote-related documents – if our products contain certified products that we should include in the offer – the system will ensure that we do not forget about them.
Offer document
When we finish cost evaluation, we have to create the document with the offer which is a time consuming task. Rachel, who is responsible for preparing the document, must ensure that the document contains all required parts mentioned in the Terms of Reference in the correct order. Customer requirements can vary and it’s impossible to prepare a universal template. Before Tendersys implementation, Rachel had to browse the document page by page, signing each one and numbering accordingly. She had to make sure that all reports and documents were up to date and valid. It took her few days to perfect one 200-pages offer. With Tendersys document creator she arranges all the parts of the document in the right order, marks the pages with the trademarks, numbers them and creates the table of contents with just few mouse clicks. It takes less than an hour. The system itself checks whether all documents are valid (on the day of submitting the offer; not on the day of preparation – this reduces the likelihood of expiration right before the offer is submitted to the client) and generates a full PDF file that can be saved in SharePoint.
Why is it worth to give Tendersys a chance?
Tendersys is a ready solution designed for customers who regularly participate in tenders. It allows us to:
- shorten the preparation time of an offer,
- eliminate errors in the preparation of the offer and thus increase our chances in the tender,
- increase our efficiency – we’ll be able to handle up to 15% of tender inquiries.
Tendersys is a tool that will help us maximize our chances in subsequent tenders. Thanks to it, we will save time and we will be able to devote to it for further requests for tenders.
Intersys
Tendersys is Intersys’ tender assistant created for companies that take part in many tenders. It was created to maximize potential of companies in the B2B market. It is a tool that integrates with Outlook, Excel, Dynamics CRM and SharePoint. It lets us:
- automate the search for current tenders on the market,
- monitor the tender process,
- efficiently generates offers for our customer.
Tendersys consists of several solutions:
- Excel add-inn that allows us to import general information about the tender from the e-mail and download detailed data when we consider the tender to be interesting,
- Dynamics CRM customization that are necessary to monitor the course of the tender process and analyse our chances of winning it.
- Dedicated and integrated with CRM tool for evaluation of product and services costs.
Document creator helping us to create a PDF file with all the necessary attachments mentioned in Terms of Reference and allowing us to easily import the documentation to Sharepoint.
