February 2019 marks R3’s 10 year business anniversary. Over these years we have built and refined our business to serve the needs of our Federal Government Contractor customers. Our approach has evolved over these 10 years along with the GovCon market and technology. Here’s a little bit about our past, present and future serving GovCon.
The First 5 Years (2009-2013)
R3 began as a services firm for non-profits and federal government contractors in the Washington DC area. We provided services to build custom business applications on top of the Microsoft SharePoint platform. During this time, we did many projects for proposal management, policy and contract management and handling IDIQ task orders. Over time we began to specialize in solutions for Federal Government Contractors.
The Last 5 Years (2014-2018)
In 2014, we decided to take our knowledge and experience and build out a set of off-the-shelf business solutions for Federal Government Contractors. Building custom solutions had been expensive for our customers and time consuming. We wanted to reduce the cost, provide easily repeatable value, and broaden the market.
Our approach was to build a set of off-the-shelf business solutions that would address the GovCon work to Win, Manage and Deliver Federal Government Contracts. These solutions would run on top of Microsoft SharePoint. We built these solutions using a common application platform. This allows each solution to stand on its own, to automate work, to be very flexible, and to natively integrate with other R3 solutions. In the summer of 2015, we launched the first generation of this set of solutions that we called the “R3 GovCon Suite”.
February 2019 – 10 Years Later – Where are we now?
Now, on our 10th business anniversary, we are in the 3rd Generation of the R3 GovCon Suite. We focus on the middle tier of Federal Government Contractors between 100 and 1,000 employees. Our solutions can now be deployed in the R3 Cloud Workplace (our software-as-a-service option), a Private Cloud like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, or, on premise.
The R3 GovCon Suite in 2019 includes 4 core solutions:
- WinCenter® for integrated Capture and Proposal Management (Win)
- Task Order Factory™ for managing IDIQ Task Order responses (Win)
- Contract Management focused on GovCon contract work (Manage)
- Program Management focused on the soft-work of GovCon program management (Deliver)
The Suite gives customers a comprehensive solution for what we call “The Middle of the GovCon Business Workstream”. This is where the work to Win, Manage and Deliver on contracts occurs. The work is collaborative, document-oriented, process oriented and can get messy. Most mid-sized GovCon organizations still do this work manually using email, spreadsheets, Microsoft Office apps and document stores like file shares, SharePoint, Google docs. We take them to the next level.
With the R3 GovCon Suite, this challenging middle area is now productized, streamlined and optimized for the way GovCon business gets done. The GovCon best practices and standards are baked into the solutions. And, the flexibility allows our customers to change the solutions to meet their ongoing needs. Customers can start with one solution and build out from there. Most of our customers have multiple solutions working within their single, integrated R3 work environment.
- To learn more about the GovCon Business Workstream, see How R3 GovCon Suite fits into the GovCon Business Workstream.
- To learn more about the current R3 GovCon Suite product line, see the R3 GovCon Suite home page.
- Click here, to read case studies of customer success.
Going Forward – The Next 5 Years
The R3 GovCon Suite has become an established, practical option for middle-tier GovCon companies. It provides customers with a solid, next generation foundation with which to grow and mature their business. Going forward, we are focused on increasing the value customers get from the use of our solutions, individually, as part of their R3 GovCon work environment, and, as part of a community of GovCon practitioners. We believe that a great deal of our innovation will come from our customers using our solutions to develop a new set of higher-level best practices. Below are three key investment areas.
R3 Solution Integration
An “integrated GovCon Workplace” is evolving. The integration between our solutions continues to evolve with customer input. This creates a seamless, cross-departmental work environment.
- For instance, you can be in WinCenter working on a proposal and search Subcontractors from Contract Management and submit requests say for an NDA or Teaming Agreement for an RFP.
- Or, you could be in Program Management and click a button to instantly see a Contract Brief with real-time information coming from Contract Management.
- Some customers use our “Division Dashboards” to allow their divisions to have a unique view of information across their R3 GovCon Workplace.
Work Analytics and Reporting
Our reporting is evolving as it increasingly uses data analytics. Now, that the work activity is being systematically tracked, you can do work analytics. Customers are coming up with new and valuable ways to manage their operations that we add to the product.
- For instance, for years a standard feature has been our “checklist” of Phases with Activities in WinCenter (like Shipley Phases and Steps). Now, each activity is tracked and scored by the system and rolled up to provide a report showing the score for each Phase of every opportunity. This is being used for Opportunity Portfolio assessments.
- Customers are using analytics to generate different Pwins to help them take action when needed.
GovCon Workstream Integration
Our GovCon Suite sits in the Middle of the 3-part GovCon Business Workstream. The front-end are sources of opportunities. The back-end are the Financial systems. The logical next step is workstream integration so that the information flows throughout.
- For example, we’ve created a two-way integration with Salesforce (CRM) on the front-end.
- On the backend, Deltek CostPoint v7 now has a web service API that allows us to programmatically access data.
- We also have an API that allows other systems (front and back or elsewhere) to access data in our system.
To learn more about the current R3 GovCon Suite product line, see the R3 GovCon Suite home page.