“Show me a business case”
If you’ve been tasked with researching the market and developing a business case for bid management software implementation to streamline your bidding process, you’re not alone in this endeavour.
Many bid professionals face the same challenge of convincing their innovation and investment committees to embrace digital solutions. In this post we’ll outline some key considerations to include in your business case to not only demonstrate potential return on investment (ROI), but also the growth opportunities it can bring to your team, and your organisation.
Understanding the Pain Points: Overcoming Bid Management Challenges
Bid managers often face several challenges that hinder efficiency and decrease success rates. By identifying these pain points and linking them to the desired outcomes, you can build a strong case for bid management software implementation. Here are common pain points and their corresponding outcomes:
- Low win rates and diminishing profits: Implementing bid management software can streamline processes, improve bid quality, and increase win rates. By leveraging automation, collaboration features, and advanced analytics, bid management software empowers your team to submit more competitive bids, resulting in higher success rates and increased profitability.
- Inefficiencies and error-prone processes: Bid management software enhances efficiency by automating repetitive tasks, reducing manual errors, and ensuring compliance with bid requirements. This leads to streamlined workflows, optimised resource allocation, and improved overall productivity.
- Lack of transparency and ineffective communication: Bid management software provides real-time visibility into an organisation’s opportunity pipeline, its bidding process, and Content Library, enabling better collaboration among stakeholders and improving communication. Enhanced transparency across the end-to-end process also helps to identify bottlenecks, and align team efforts, leading to increased responsiveness and better decision-making.
- Bureaucracy and administrative overload: Bid management software simplifies administrative tasks, such as document management, version control, and tracking of bid phases, response status, and outcomes. By automating these processes, bid managers, writers and contributors can focus on strategic activities, maximising their time and efforts on winning business rather than tedious administrative burdens.
- Inconsistent learning and continuous improvement: Bid management software facilitates data collection and analysis, enabling organisations to measure bid performance, identify trends, and capture lessons learned. This data-driven approach empowers bid managers to implement continuous improvement strategies, resulting in refined bid strategies and higher ROI over time.
Building the Business Case: Return on Investment and Growth Opportunities
A business case is a document that outlines the justification for initiating a project or undertaking a specific business initiative, like digital transformation. It presents a comprehensive analysis of the costs, benefits, risks, and potential returns of the proposed project or initiative. The purpose of a business case is to provide decision-makers with the necessary information to evaluate the viability and potential value of the investment and make an informed decision on whether to proceed or not. A well-prepared business case typically includes sections on the project objectives, scope, stakeholders, financial analysis, implementation plan, and potential risks and mitigation strategies. It serves as a tool to demonstrate the potential value and feasibility of the inititiative and helps secure the necessary resources and support for its execution.
It is important to sell the change management and outcomes rather than the technology in a business case because ultimately, it is the people within an organization who will be responsible for implementing and adopting the technology. Technology alone does not guarantee successful implementation and adoption.
Here’s how you can craft a compelling business case:
- Quantify potential ROI: Calculate the potential ROI of being able to more efficiently win the right contracts. Estimate the impact of better qualification, increased win rates, reduced response time and costs through process automation, improved resource allocation and enhanced data analytics capability. Highlight the projected financial gains achievable by comparing current ways to new ways using digital bidding tools. Align the implementation approach to your operational and digital strategy to gain cross-functional buying. An example might be to roll the software out as a pilot to a priority business or service line involving a small number super-users.
- Showcase efficiency gains: Demonstrate how bid management software can streamline processes, eliminate manual errors, and optimise resource allocation. Calculate time saved, productivity improvements, and the ability to handle more bids simultaneously. Emphasise the ability to scale operations without significant resource expansion.
- Highlight competitive advantage: Illustrate how bid management software can differentiate your organisation from competitors by delivering high-quality bids, faster response times, and improved user experience. Showcase how the software’s AI-powered knowledge base, advanced search, advanced analytics and insights can help to quickly find the information you need; more intelligently match questions with the most relevant responses; and extract key insights to support decision-making.
- Outline risk mitigation: Address risk mitigation through improved compliance and accuracy, reduced rework, and enhanced collaboration. Showcase how bid management software minimises the risk of missed requirements, errors, and compliance issues, thereby protecting the organisation’s reputation and reducing potential financial liabilities.
- Focus on strategic growth: Highlight how the bid management software frees up valuable time for bid managers and team members to focus on strategic activities, such as building relationships, identifying new markets, and developing innovative bid strategies and solutions. Position the bid software as a catalyst for organisational growth and a more mature bid process – one that shifts the focus from digitisation, to optimisation by upskilling staff with data analytics capability and real-time insights to support other parts of the business such as sales, operations and Board reporting.
Have an Implementation Plan
Accompanying your business case should be a high level implementation schedule including critical path activities, proposed timeframes and milestones. The document could contain an outline of your expectations and how you plan to evaluate the effectiveness of your digital initiatives (consider KPIs and metrics aligned to strategic objectives ie. expected time and cost savings). Include a breakdown of the proposed rollout/deployment strategy (ie. functional business unit/ geographic reach), and activities to support each phase of the implementation. This may include planning, readiness (including training), ongoing support, and any business continuity considerations. The project team members should be identified, including what will be performed by whom along with resources to be provided.
Looking for a Business Case Template? Download our Free Resource!
Business Case Template_Bidhive Example
Closing Thoughts
As with any digital transformation initiative, effective sponsorship and visible commitment during implementation drives stakeholder engagement. Successful implementation learns from champions and uses feedback to continually refine strategies to enhance employee support/training/stakeholder alignment. Having an agile governance mindset also helps to address roadblocks quickly and supports the ability to adapt to a changing context and drive cross-functional, fail-fast-learn behavioural change deeper into the organisation.
Crafting a compelling business case for bid management software implementation is crucial for driving your organisation’s digital bid transformation. As a bid manager, you can do this!! Just like bidding, by addressing the pain points and challenges of traditional bid management, and highlighting the potential return on investment and growth opportunities, you can effectively demonstrate the value and benefits of adopting bid management software.
