Major Contract Tendering Transformation
Cross-functional alignment increases efficiency and success
- 3 minutes read
Our client was one of Australia’s largest privately held companies. Its two vertically integrated divisions, a construction constructor and a contract miner, created industry leadership positions. Supporting these divisions were construction and mining plant hire businesses and a building materials manufacturing business.
The company had completed a strategic review that identified a need to transform how it managed its business development and tendering activities to deliver its growth ambitions. A five-year strategy had been set, and an overhaul of the business development approach was progressing well. However, the workstream to increase the efficiency and success rate of the tendering process was lagging and required acceleration.
ORBIZ was engaged in facilitating a review of the tendering process to identify the bottlenecks and deficiencies causing cost blowouts and program overruns and then generate an improvement plan. The objective was to implement a new efficient approach to tendering that would synchronise and streamline all functions to work towards a common goal of successfully executing tenders.
175%
8:1 to 3:1 through smarter and more effective tendering
The approach
A three-phased approach was initiated, through which team members from across each company division provided their insight and experience of the tendering process to help understand where the improvement opportunities resided.
The current state was analysed end-to-end using a detailed ‘swim lane’ process map, allowing each functional team to contribute to the activity. This was important to establish the current baseline and create a shared understanding of what everyone was doing and where the friction points were; this was critical as the process involved many stakeholders from disparate teams across the organisation.
The initial activity focused on identifying parallel activities and interdependencies, known bottlenecks, active concerns, and parts of the process where rework often occurred. It also collated lead times and documentation for each essential process element. This initial phase enabled the project team to understand the current process’s performance and estimate the potential improvement scale.
The solutions
Once all stakeholders clearly understood the current state, the future state framework was defined at a high level by mapping out a new process in swim lanes. In parallel, the critical issues from the current state mapping exercise were grouped and defined into functional themes through affinity. The issue groups were analysed to develop proposed solutions, and their benefit was weighted against the initial problem statement and perceived benefit. This enabled effective prioritisation of initiatives for implementation. The key stakeholders were then engaged in developing workable solutions for the major issues, thus ensuring they would own the future state.
A detailed future state implementation plan was mapped out, with all the required solutions, disseminated for agreement and documented. The implementation plan included several quick wins and all necessary medium and long-term activities, while all resources and time commitments were agreed upon and established.
Finally, once the solution design phase was completed and the implementation plan agreed upon, the client could allocate the required resources to effectively and efficiently implement the new processes. ORBIZ provided project management support to the implementation plan and worked with a software solution provider to ensure the new CRM process was implemented in alignment with client and stakeholder requirements.
Learn more about our services
Interested in learning more about how ORBIZ can help your organisation? Fill in your details below and one of our team members will be in touch.