Aerospace & Defense Contractor

Streamlined project management system by creating a more efficient proposal process.

The Client

A leading global engineering and manufacturing provider of government services in aerospace and defense. The company has 40,000 employees in the United States with $9 billion in 2007 revenues.

The Challenge

As an engineering and manufacturing contractor that works primarily with government agencies, the Client responds to requests for proposal (RFPs) more than 60 times a year. The company's process for preparing to submit a proposal includes everything from the identification of the opportunity to the commitment of resources to management reviews. The resulting technical and cost proposal can be thousands of pages in length and must be submitted in as short as 30 days from RFP issuance. To support its process for capturing new business, the client needed to develop a custom software application over the course of three years. The requirements of this tool included:

• Providing a combination of resource management, portfolio management and resource scheduling
• Increase the efficiency for long-range planning and new business acquisition in an increasingly competitive environment
• Allow for the necessary flexibility to grow and adapt to evolving business needs and process improvements

Other key challenges included:

• User interface and workflow inefficiency
• Personnel duplicity on proposal assignments
• Lack of integration with the company's Active Directory service for allocating resources across multiple activities, avoid overlapping assignments
• Improve the flexibility and accessibility of updating data in reports

The Pcubed Solution

In response, Pcubed developed an enterprise project management solution based on Microsoft technologies. The new system improved reporting, data management and resource allocation, thus increasing collaboration and efficiency. The Client is now able to pursue additional business opportunities using more repeatable processes and fewer resources. The new solution made for more satisfied employees and customers, but also resulted in a higher new business win rate.

Key elements of the solution included:

• Improved resource allocation and proposal quality - "This helps us submit better proposals, which increases our likelihood of being awarded the jobs." - Director of IT Engineering
• Increased productivity and collaboration - The new solution helps the Client's users streamline their proposal efforts by supporting the company's workflow processes as they change
• Better decision making - The integrated nature of the new solution helps the Client retrieve and analyze data for better business intelligence, which aids the company when deciding which RFPs to pursue