Summit Consulting, a small and growing minority-owned management consulting firm, benefits from better BD data management and gains strategic and tactical value across the BD lifecycle.

Better BD Data Management by Data Analytics Firm: Realizing Strategic and Tactical Value Across the Complete BD Lifecycle

We typically don’t think about speed in the GovCon business development (BD) lifecycle unless it relates to how quickly we can respond to an RFP as the 11^th hour nears. But gaining speed across all facets of the lifecycle can add both strategic and tactical value to an organization.  At the strategic level, having all the information about an account, your pipeline, and specific opportunities can drive faster, more informed, and more confident decisions early in the lifecycle. At the tactical level, being able to quickly find and reuse information and reduce the time spent searching and/or re-creating can drive competitive advantage downstream.

About Summit Consulting, LLC

Summit Consulting, LLC, is a small and growing minority-owned management consulting firm located in Washington, DC.  In operation for nearly 20 years, it specializes in economics, statistics, and analytics to implement both quantitative and qualitative solutions for Federal Agencies and private-sector companies.  Some of its Federal clients include USDA, HUD, the Treasury Department, and the Department of Education.

Summit has experienced rapid growth over the past few years and it became apparent that its existing account management and BD systems weren’t sufficient to support that growth. Specifically, it needed better account management capabilities and a general improvement in all of its BD processes.  The current systems simply couldn’t scale to meet the needs of the BD, capture, and proposal teams.

“Our BD process was very inefficient and couldn’t support the level of growth we were experiencing,” said Hy Alvaran, a Proposal Coordinator at Summit. “It was difficult to understand where opportunities were in the process and to see what activities were being undertaken to support them. It significantly hampered our account management capability.”

According to Alvaran, it was difficult not just to find information critical to the BD decision-making process, but also information to build proposals, such as past proposals and other relevant content. This further slowed the pursuit of various opportunities as much time was spent looking for or re-creating content.

Account and Pipeline Management

To address its challenges, Summit selected R3’s WinCenter Software for Federal Government Contractors.  One of the key reasons Summit chose WinCenter was that it closely matched the BD lifecycle best practices in the Federal sector.

“One of the things we liked best about WinCenter is that it is specific to GovCon,” said Alvaran.  “It provided us with the rigor needed to organize and meaningfully discuss our pipeline, while being able to evolve with our needs as a growing firm. Instead of wasting time cleaning data, we can have strategic conversations about the opportunities we are pursuing.”

To further support account management, Summit’s WinCenter implementation also includes a Contact Management view.  This allows the team to fully document and track conversations with various individuals and accounts, including follow-up conversations, meetings, notes, and more. WinCenter also makes it much easier to pull reports and to find data and information.

“WinCenter really elevated our account management capability,” said Alvaran. “Everything is in the system, for both historical and real-time purposes,” said Alvaran. “It used to take hours to put together a standard pipeline report: each time, information first had to be validated, corrected, cleaned, and re-organized. Now, with a more structured platform that enables improved governance, it takes me minutes!”

Finding and Reusing Proposal Assets

Another key benefit of WinCenter is the ease of finding and reusing proposal assets. Prior to WinCenter, much of this searching required significant institutional knowledge among a few people who knew where assets were located. It significantly slowed the process and created a burden for those tasked with finding information.

To solve this problem, Summit began using WinCenter to improve its organization of proposal assets by making them searchable, thereby expanding access to more people. The resulting searchable library of assets greatly amplified teamwork and simplified the need to find assets more quickly.

“The system has refined our ability to search by subject matter, related proposals, and other factors,” said Alvaran. “Time that used to be spent asking around for proposal assets can now be used to actually start writing proposals!”

“People don’t have to go in circles to find information anymore, whether for account management or proposal assets,” said Alvaran. “It’s amazing!”

While gaining both strategic and tactical value with WinCenter, Summit is just starting. They continue to leverage WinCenter to improve how they work across the the BD lifecycle.

To see how R3 WinCenter for GovCon BD, Capture and Proposal Management can add value across the BD Lifecycle visit the main R3 WinCenter product page or contact us at sales@r3bsolutions.com.