Pricing projects has traditionally been a manual, confused and hurried process across various departments, exposing us to huge risk and discouraging good governance.

Bid Model has given us complete control over pricing our projects and reduced the time to bid by 50% by centralizing the process for all parties in a controlled and transparent way.  We are now able to re-use parts of prior bids, accurately move the bid baselines straight into our Project Manager software and improve project quality by enforcing governance processes.

Our client is one of the world’s top professional services firms in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction sector and part of a global group of companies headquartered in Canada.  With such small margins in the industry, it is vitally important to price new work accurately so as not to eat into profits, while still remaining competitive enough to win work. To do so requires a clear and controlled process over project bidding, reporting and governance across several business functions and geographies. Traditionally, this process has been managed manually using excel spreadsheets and email; fraught with manual error, assumptions and risk.

In bidding for a project, a Project Manager first must establish a strategy based on the client’s budget, scope, timeline and deliverables before sharing that “program” with multiple departments in his organization for pricing. These individual components of the total price might include architecture, site supervision, engineering, finance, MEP building services, external authorities and the like which are then all combined to arrive at a total project bid price to present to the client for consideration, in order to win the job. Sound simple enough?

And other questions, such as:

In a project of any scale, dealing with multiple stakeholders both internally and externally requires the centralized and timely organization of all critical bid details and communication, with the ability for access control so that relevant parties are privy to relevant information only and confidential information is kept just so.

With the ability to access disparate systems from within Atkins’ Finance, HR, CRM, P6 and ERP and organize the data in bespoke visualizations, Keross was able to work with the firm to develop a systemized workflow for the bidding process with minimal latency, in just four weeks. “Bid Model” software was developed alongside Atkins, to integrate its relevant business systems and enforce its governance process in workflows. The software is able to evolve as required and can therefore be scaled across the global enterprise.

Bid Model’s central dashboard offers a clearly defined scope of activities, assigned responsibilities, and program to avoid any confusion and to allow all parties involved to interact together to avoid duplicity.  Bid Model has the ability to push and pull datafrom adjacent CRM, Governance, Finance and HR systems within Atkins to access the right information consistently, to enforce approvals at various stages, to compare with baseline assumptions throughout each bid iteration and in time, to plot a history of similar projects in order to develop actual trends as opposed to hypothetical assumptions.  It even offers a “sandbox” area to allow management to adjust the bid by item, time or resource and watch the impact on overall cost.

Bid Model is a brilliant tool which offers one source of transparent collaboration in the bidding process for projects of any kind. It empowers business leaders to take ownership of pricing and ensures a single baseline is transparent for all involved.   The “bottom up” approach to fee estimation is now a rule-based “top down” tool.