Winning contracts is the start. Successful small business Federal Government Contractors follow growth of contract wins with improvements in how they manage their post-award operations of contract management and program management. This article describes the situation of one growing GovCon firm and why they choose R3 solutions to operationalize their contract and program management work.
The Challenge
This small Federal Government Contractor had been growing rapidly for a few years. They had just passed 140 employees. They were consistently winning new business. They were now feeling pressure on their post-award operations. They did have processes – on paper. And, they had best practices. But, they did not have any formal collaborative systems for managing contract work or managing the program delivery of the contracts. So, the work was driven, done, managed and reported on manually. The information was spread out in multiple places. It was not possible to get a single view of where things were in real time.
They had hit a point where management felt that they were at risk of things falling through the cracks. They knew that the manual way of working was unproductive. And, they knew that it would be risky and costly to keep growing the business without better systems. It was time to add formal systems that would allow them to operationalize the contract work and the program work.
Driven by the Chief Operating Officer, they began by looking for a contract management system. They wanted a central repository to bring together the contract information that was spread out into many places. They needed to manage their Federal customer contracts and their related subcontractors and subcontracts. And, they needed to streamline and automate their contract processes. They also needed the system to support the specific needs of Federal Government Contractors such as managing CLINs, FAR/DFAR details and Contract Modifications.
In addition, they were looking for a system that would enable them to manage GovCon Program Management. They needed to be able to manage the soft work of program management that is unique to government contractors. This includes work such as capturing and sharing program information, managing contract deliverables, status updates, driving action items, and, tracking and managing program performance.
They had two department heads for Contracts and for Program Management that would each control their systems and the work. These systems would need to provide the structure for the information and work. And, they would need to be able to streamline and automate the work processes. And, they wanted them to be able to be integrated – a seamless work environment.
The Solution
They evaluated multiple contract management systems. But, they were designed to support organizations that sold to commercial organizations, not the Federal government. They also researched program management systems. But, these were really project management systems that were task oriented. They weren’t designed to manage the soft work of GovCon program management.
They eventually found R3 and its GovCon Suite. The Suite consists of a set of work management solutions built to meet the specific needs of Federal Government Contractors. R3 has solutions for winning Federal contracts, managing the contracts, and delivering the contracts. This customer was focused on the post-award work. They choose two solutions: R3 Contract Management for GovCon and R3 Program Management for GovCon. They are effectively “two sides of the same coin” and designed to work together to manage the post-award work.
- The Contract Management solution is where you manage contract work. It provides a central repository for all contract data. This includes customer contracts and subcontracts. It includes the core data and documents and all of the standard related GovCon information. It also drives all of the processes and workflows for contract management.
- The Program Management solution is the flip side. For each contract there is a managed “program”. Each program has its own workspace. The information is there. You set up and manage the formal Contract Deliverables. You manage the internal Actions Items and Status Updates. You can also organize and manage various Performance items that can vary from program to program.
These two solutions work together. For instance, you can be in Contract Management and see all of the contract deliverables that are in process across all of the programs. Or, you can be in Program Management and see all of the Contract Modifications or initiate changes or subcontract actions.
Getting to the Next Level
This customer deployed the R3 solutions in a private cloud that they controlled on Amazon Web Services. The R3 solutions run in a single environment that is on and within a Microsoft SharePoint environment. So, all information is part of a single system. Each R3 solution has its own separate user interface controlled by the department owners. Yet, they are integrated. So, they operate like two sides of the same coin.
Each solution serves as a central repository of information. The customer was able to quickly and easily migrate information from its spreadsheets and file shares into the system supported by R3 professional services and tools for this purpose. Quickly, these solutions became their “single source of truth”.
A key value proposition of the R3 solutions is their ability to streamline and automate the work that is done in contracts and programs. The system drives the processes and handles the notifications, status updates and real-time reporting. The customer can see the work that is being done across contracts or programs. Given that these solutions are designed for Federal Government Contractors, they are pre-designed to support specific work processes. This allowed the customer to easily and cost effectively adopt the solutions and get productive quickly.
In addition, this customer had some special ways of working. The R3 solutions are very flexible and have built in configuration wizards to allow organizations to modify the processes and feature set. So, they were able to customize their processes, workflows and automation to match their way of working.
Now, supported by the R3 contract and program management solutions, this organization has operationalized their way of working. This enables them to scale their business with confidence. And, they also know that the system can be modified to support their evolving and emerging operational needs.
To learn more about these solutions, click here for R3 Contract Management and click here for R3 Program Management.
To see Contract Management in action, watch the video below.