Capture & Proposal Process Consulting

Did you know that having the right capture and proposal process can raise your win probability, increase your new business revenue, and decrease your cost of new business acquisition? All major government contractors know this and have some level of defined process for their business development (BD), capture, and proposal activities.

In the best companies, processes are designed and optimized for the government market. These processes take into account the company’s management structure, work culture, and competitiveness of its market. They are fully integrated from new business opportunity identification to contract award.

Whether your company is poised for growth, considering an acquisition, or needs to boost win rates, we can help.

Our Business Development Operations (BDO) process experts will assess your company’s BD, capture, and proposal processes, compare them to our government contractor best practices model (GovCon BPM), identify and assess any process and procedure gaps, and then build an actionable roadmap that will improve your processes, raise your win probability, and reduce your overall business acquisition costs.

We can design and build your new processes and procedures and implement them using your company’s existing tools, such as SharePoint, Deltek GovWin CRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and others. And, if you choose, we can help recommend the best combination of industry-accepted tools that meet your BDO needs.

Defining Your Business Development, Capture, and Proposal Processes

Successful companies recognize that building the right BD, capture, and proposal processes is key to their growth and survival. They also know that the sooner they implement well-designed processes, the more successful they will be. Our BDO process experts work with both large and small companies to build defined, repeatable, managed, measured, and optimized BD, capture, and proposal processes, and they can build processes specifically designed for your company.

You can expect the processes we develop to be fully documented with step-by-step procedures for every activity in the BD, capture, and proposal life cycle. Depending on the program developed, your new fully defined and integrated BD, capture, and proposal management processes can include:

• Instructional materials integrated into each step of the process that explain how to perform each activity in the business acquisition life cycle—along with checklists and assessment criteria to ensure you are performing each activity well
• A complete set of templates to collect the data needed to manage the business acquisition process

Tuning Up Your Existing Business Development, Capture, and Proposal Processes

Company mergers provide an excellent opportunity to tune-up and standardize BD operations for the combined corporate entity. Defining best practices and streamlining operations is a necessary task, but most companies don’t have the time or resources to do this.

Our BDO process experts can take on this task. We tailor your tune-up to build on your existing processes—preserving what has worked—and introducing or revising processes that fall short of our industry best-practices model. The overall result is a fully integrated business process based on the combined strengths of your previous processes and recognized industry best practices.

Our experts focus on the following:

• Achieving a complete, logical, and integrated process for business acquisition
• Increasing efficiency and effectiveness of the overall business acquisition processes to allow you to purse more new business and lower your overall cost per bid
• Leveraging existing business tools where appropriate to increase accuracy and consistency of results
• Implementing the processes in an enterprise-wide management repository to ensure access to business acquisition artifacts, enhance reuse, and provide a basis for measuring and optimizing BDO processes

Our experts can help you tune-up your existing processes and realign them with your organizational model.

Implementing Your Business Development, Capture, and Proposal Processes

Save money, time, and human capital. Let us implement your newly designed BD, capture, and proposal process. We use your existing business tools to design a virtual workspace comprising the materials, templates, and repositories that drive a rigorous approach to opportunity pursuit—tailored to your company’s unique circumstances, environment, and culture.

We will implement your processes in a Capture Command Center (CCC) built in your SharePoint environment that you can use to manage BD, capture, and proposal activities. Your CCC can have the following features:

• Single-access portal that integrates the management of BD, capture, and proposal activities into a seamless work process with work products stored in a searchable enterprise repository
• Secure information access based on employee/team member role and email address with password protection to limit information viewing down to the document level
• Defined, repeatable, managed, and measurable integrated process optimized for your business and used to manage the pursuit of each individual opportunity
• Instructional materials integrated into every process, providing step-by-step directions on how to do each activity and how to self-assess the completeness and competitiveness of the work done
• Appropriate management reviews built into the process from opportunity qualification through submission of revised final proposals
• Complete set of reusable standard templates for all data-collection activities that can be tailored to individual pursuits
• A virtual workspace for BD, capture managers, and proposal managers to work individual opportunities and share information with employees and team members
• Guidance on building capture and proposal plans for each individual opportunity with data-collection templates for management presentations and reviews
• A defined folder structure for each capture step
• An enterprise repository to archive data, work products, documents, and other artifacts developed during each pursuit for reuse in future pursuits
• Management dashboard and performance metrics to assess business acquisition status at the corporate, sector, and division levels
• Access to other knowledge management systems, such as your résumé database, past performance database, graphics library, past proposal library, and pre-written proposal content—as well as desktop publishing shortcuts and training
• Easy access to capture information
• Simplified configuration control of proposals products
• Easy maintenance, updating, and searching of past performance summaries, résumés, images, historic data, and contract information

As we build your CCC in our web-accessible development site, you can see every step in the development process. Once the development work is complete, we transition your implementation to your SharePoint server to run behind your firewall, providing additional security for this critical implementation. From there on, administration can be done by your staff, and we can continue to support refinements to your implementation.

To provide additional levels of workflow control and management reporting, we can integrate your CCC with your installed CRM systems, such as Deltek GovWin CRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SalesForce.com, and others. These CRM systems can also accept opportunity tracking data from market research services such as FedSources and others and can be configured to push opportunity updates from the market research service into the CCC. Because we share data with these systems, data entry is done only once, not multiple times.

Creating and Populating Résumé and
Past Performance Databases

We design the CCC to serve as a portal to other company knowledge management systems, such as your résumé database and past performance database. If you don’t have these databases, we can create and populate these databases for you.

Our expert staff build dynamic, searchable résumé and/or past performance databases for clients so they can rest assured that the data is always accessible and up-to-date. We then manage and administer the databases, working with your staff to ensure content remains current.

Résumé Database

We build specialized résumé databases especially designed for supporting BD activities. These résumé databases are different from applicant tracking databases. We collect and manage the information needed to select candidate résumé for your proposals and gather the data needed to write résumés tailored to the specific programs you bid. We employ the following approach:

• Define project scope and goals, including establishing overall searchable database structure, résumé standard format, and résumé metadata and searchable tags, and then delineate user accessibility and security requirements.
• Develop the infrastructure to house working and final résumés as they mature through the résumé development and review process, culminating in a Résumé Search Library (RSL) housing all final résumés. RSL is fully searchable according to predefined properties tagged in each résumé and allows Boolean logic searches of all résumé text.
• Develop a list of employees needing résumés developed and reach out to employees to collect source résumés, modify as needed, edit for style and completeness, and upload finished résumés to RSL.
• Provide detailed documentation about the résumé development process, including defined templates, style and acronym guides, and project plan/design.
• Provide training for management team.
• Continue to administer and manage the database and its content using our workflow process and defined schedule for routine updating (quarterly, annually, or other interval). Alternately, after initial development and implementation, we can turn over database and content administration and maintenance to you to manage internally.

Past Performance Database

We provide a past performance database that includes company past contracts and task order profiles and that is searchable using both contract metadata as well as Boolean logic searches. Past performance databases are different from contract databases. Past performance databases capture work accomplishments—not just work scope—and are designed to capture information necessary to get an outstanding score in proposal evaluations. We also archive multiple versions of the same past performance citation so you can have access to all previous write-ups used in proposals. We employ the following approach:

• Establish standards, define tagging properties and search features, and delineate user accessibility and security schema.
• Develop infrastructure to accommodate working and final documents as they mature through the process, culminating in a Past Performance Search Library (PPSL) housing all final contract and task order descriptions. PPSL is fully searchable according to predefined properties tagged as well as all description text.
• Develop a prioritized list of the most important contracts—both active and recently completed—to populate the database initially. We then reach out to identified client points of contact or repositories (e.g., program managers, contracts leads, proposals archives) to collect source information on contracts, develop detailed descriptions of each contract, and upload them to PPSL.
• Document process, including defined templates, styles, acronym guides, and project plan and design.
• Provide training for management team.
• Continue to administer and manage database and content using our workflow process and defined schedule for routine updates (quarterly, annually, or other interval). Alternately, after initial development and implementation, we can turn over database and content administration and maintenance to you to manage internally.

For further information and to schedule an on-line demonstration of the system, please contact Bob Lohfeld at RLohfeld@LohfeldConsulting.com.