Bid Management System Development

Bid Metrics have proven through years of data gathering, that if their customers use a scoring system when putting together complex bids, and they increase their response score, they will significantly increase their chances of winning the bid. We helped Bid Metrics digitise this scoring system by creating an app to manage, track and score complex bids.

The problem

Trying to win large bids is a complicated, time consuming and expensive job and there are often 100’s if not 1000’s of response requirements which can involve multiple experts from an organisation. Response quality control can quickly become an issue while trying to meet tight timelines.

We went through a series of in depth scoping and UI workshops to finalise usability and functionality of the build to address these issues.

What we did

• Bespoke UX and UI design based on user feedback
• Custom database setup to store all the bid and user data
• Built a naming and numbering convention that could be both flexible, as well as easy to search and track to accommodate Request for Proposal (RFP) documents
• Implemented a bespoke bid countdown clock.
• Milestone scoring with complex calculations to determine the likely outcome of a bid
• Programmed success criteria to display in graphs and charts across three key milestone periods for each bid, tracking the likely success of the bid response at each particular milestone
• Implemented reporting functionality so key stakeholders can see a bids health at a glance
• Made sure that everything was absolutely secure and that only appropriate people have access to sensitive pieces of client data

UX/UI Design

Converting multiple spreadsheets and process flow ideas into a user friendly application interface is not an easy task. Our design team spent a significant amount of time working through and testing multiple options.

The end result was beautiful dashboards and easy to use data entry interfaces that simply made sense and allowed the user to save a lot of time while using the system vs trying to track and analyse data via spreadsheets.

Custom database

We had to create a bespoke database that allowed a lot of different data sets to be integrated for reporting and bid measurement. Every single piece of data had to be broken down and scored individually, tagged to authors and secured by certain access levels. Historical data also had to be kept so progress could be quickly calculated.

Each RFP document has unique naming and numbering conventions, sometimes more than 100,000 pages. So we had to build a naming and numbering convention that could be both flexible, as well as easy to search/track.

Calculations and functionality

Once all the bid data has been captured we needed to do something with it.

We implemented Milestone scoring with complex calculations to determine the likely outcome of bid at certain critical stages. Giving vital insights into how a bid was tracking and the likely hood of success.

Graphs and charts were developed to help represent this data back to the user while a Doomsday Clock and Milestones countdown timer was put front and centre to help keep bids on track.

Reporting

We created easy to understand reporting dashboards so that key stakeholders can see the health of any given bid at a glance.

• These reports aggregated all the response and score data and tied it back to the key milestones
• Separate dashboards with limited information were also created for different stakeholders
• User ranking and reporting was also added so top-performing respondents could be easily identified
• Exporting of reports

The result?

Clients win rates while using the system during bids was lifted by an average of 10% (and growing).