5 tips for successful bid management
Bidding on projects can put a lot of time and money at risk, so how you can bid efficiently and consistently?
1: Manage risk factors
Risk is complex to capture in a consistent, timely manner. But managing due diligence at this early stage can pay dividends later.
Using a checklist ensures commercial checks and due diligence is carried out.
Using a consistent risk assessment structure at the start of a project can:
• Identify projects with a good chance of being delivered profitably and see fewer losses.
• Decrease debt and improve overall cash flow with better decision making.
2: Play to your strengths
Not knowing whether you’ve done business with a client, or the kind of work you’ve done for them, can be problematic. Different divisions can compete for the same work and if valuable insight gained from previous jobs only exists in people’s heads, staff will waste time and money ‘reinventing the wheel’.
With a centralised contact management system, you’ll:
• Focus on the bids you can win– identify where previous successes lie, and the skills present within your organisation.
• Pinpoint new opportunities more accurately, based on better knowledge of past projects.
• Save time, as new jobs can be quickly edited from previous ones.
3: See what’s coming down the line
Getting an accurate picture of work on the horizon is essential to understanding your future cash position, but many companies carry out this process manually. For example, carrying this out using Excel is time-consuming, but an automated system will produce reports in seconds, eradicating time and errors from the process.
By automating your pipeline analysis, you can:
• Provide the board with an accurate picture of future projects.
• See which of your bids and projects are most likely to close.
• Save time and effort with the finance team.
4: Capture costs early
It’s easy for costs to slip through at the early stages. Without some way of capturing costs early on, you face nasty surprises further down the line and a serious erosion of your margin. Recording all contact, effort expended and costs incurred as soon as the opportunity is deemed worth a serious bid, isn’t just good for the bottom line, it helps inform future projects too.
As a project progresses, it can be converted from ‘bid’ to ‘project’ status, enabling you to analyse costs at any stage of the project lifecycle. By implementing central cost capture from day one, you can:
• Understand the true costs and profitability of every bid/project throughout its lifecycle.
• See how much it costs you to win new work.
• Work on the bids you can win– and improve the accuracy of estimates based on better knowledge of past projects.
5: Gain full visibility of your pipeline
Being able to keep a close eye over projects will help keep your profit margin intact. A centralised project platform management system will enable you to turn bids into live jobs within a single click, updating their status for all to see without any duplication on your part. From here, budgets can be assigned and built up as the project continues.
By implementing workflow into a project system, you’ll:
• Reduce rekeying and errors across the entire conversion process.
• Gain visibility of a fuller pipeline, enabling improved income/cost forecasts.
• Provide a clearer audit of where projects are activated while still “at risk” i.e. proper confirmation has not been gained from the client.
• Have greater visibility over which jobs make it past the bid stage.
