Proposal Efficiency
In today’s highly competitive government contracting space, proposal efficiency can be the difference between winning and losing valuable business. For organizations like Pragmatics, improving how proposals are developed, reviewed, and submitted is critical to driving growth and staying ahead.
About Pragmatics
“Innovative solutions that meet mission critical needs.”
Pragmatics, Inc is a leading Cloud, Development, Security & Operations (DevSecOps) and Data solutions provider. These solutions operate in a range of industries, from Software & Systems Engineering, Business Intelligence to Cybersecurity, Program Management, and Transportation.
Pragmatics combines the latest cloud offerings with their streamlined DevSecOps processes. This accelerates their client’s journey through their digital transformation, modernization, and cloud migration. Their data scientists & engineers collaborate with clients to identify and leverage new patterns, insights, and predictive analytics to support proposal efficiency across delivery initiatives.
These insights are gathered through advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms, approaches, and tools. Pragmatics brings together an enterprise vision with deep technical expertise for comprehensive client solutions that contribute to proposal efficiency.
Challenges to Achieving Proposal Efficiency
Pragmatics were looking for a more streamlined way to bid on pursuits. They needed to improve the use of their time to make better bid decisions and boost proposal efficiency. After completing an internal process audit, they discovered three main areas of change needed to move new business development forward:
1. Forecasting Pipeline
Their existing process did not allow their teams to consistently identify opportunities to forecast and build quality pipeline, impacting proposal efficiency at the earliest stages.
2. Writing a compliant & compelling narrative
As a small proposal development team, consistently ensuring that any written narrative was both compliant and compelling against the specific requirements of any RFP, SOW, PWS, or SOO proved to be a tremendous time drain; consequently, this significantly hurt overall proposal efficiency.
3. Manual time drain
As a result, the lack of automation software and systems in place was a major inhibitor to growth and scalability due to the manual time drain on available resources, creating inefficiencies in proposal efficiency.
The Solution: Laying the Foundation for Proposal Efficiency
The Pragmatics team initially began researching several proposal automation software vendors in order to solve these issues and ultimately enhance proposal efficiency. Moreover, having previously worked with VisibleThread in other organizations, Fred Vlchek, Director of Business Development Operations at Pragmatics, already understood the value of VT Docs. Additionally, Fred’s past experience with the VisibleThread Customer Success (CS) Team proved to be a significant differentiating factor as well. Consequently, he was confident that they would provide the necessary guidance and mentorship for seamless solution integration and overall successful deployment.
Once installed, Pragmatics promptly adjusted their process to incorporate VT Docs in order to shred the proposal and create the initial compliance matrix. Consequently, this provided the company with a standardized means of creating the initial delivery articles and governance over their development—clearly a key step toward achieving sustainable proposal efficiency.
Furthermore, as their skills with VT Docs grew, the team began generating Acronym Lists and Readability Reports, gradually integrating them into the development process. Additionally, Fred highlighted these features as essential for automating proposal documentation. As a result, the hands-on time required was greatly reduced, thereby ultimately boosting overall proposal efficiency.
“To find those pieces in the narratives, in the pricing, and in the win themes is huge. Now, we are able to build a more quality product. Ultimately, it leads to a higher P-Win.”
After implementing the process changes, the Pragmatics team began using VisibleThread to qualify new business opportunities. First, they built concept dictionaries aligned with their business verticals and ‘Take to Market’ vision. This allowed them to quickly process numerous RFP/SOW/SOO/PWS documents and score them against company capabilities.
As a result, pipeline quality and proposal efficiency improved significantly. Additionally, they could easily adapt to industry trends and customer needs by updating or creating new concept dictionaries, keeping them agile and competitive.
“VisibleThread is a time saver, it really is. It helps us to take our limited resources and focus on where we should be putting our dollars to maximize the most benefit for our company”
The Impact: Real Metrics Behind Proposal Efficiency Gains
In the first year of rollout, not only did the Pragmatics team see improvements in quality, time, and efficiency, but these gains also allowed them to significantly reduce SOW/RFI response turnaround time. Consequently, this freed up the team to focus more on adding strategic value. Overall, the impact on proposal efficiency is clearly demonstrated in the following metrics:
1.5 days to 2 hrs
- Shredding the RFP/SOW/PWS went from between 1-1.5 days to 1-2 hours
8 hrs to 2 hrs
- Creating a compliance Matrix went from between 6-8 hours to 1-2 hours
4 hrs to 20 mins
- Generating an acronym list went from between 3-4 hours to 15-20 minutes
20 down to 12
- Reduction in Grade Level. Fred’s team introduced readability grade level scoring into their process. Using the Readability Reports, documents went from a grade level of 20 down to 12, or lower, making them easier to understand
- Value-add to the business development and proposal process
VT Docs use is now a fundamental to the Pragmatics business development and proposal writing process. It has assisted with all elements of proposal development; from speaking the customers language, to reducing stress for writers worrying about formatting and acronyms. Generating starter compliance matrices and being able to map them straight across to RFP’s is invaluable to the Pragmatics team. The team is now enhancing proposal efficiency at every step.
- Assisting the qualification process
When making bid/no-bid decisions, Pragmatics consistently relies on Concept Tracking to quickly and accurately qualify opportunities that closely align with their capabilities. Furthermore, by actively customizing dictionaries with specific terminology tied directly to their market pillars, they generate detailed heat maps that clearly reveal term frequency across multiple RFPs. As a result, this approach not only sharpens bid prioritization but also significantly boosts their chances of success by allowing the team to focus specifically on well-aligned and highly qualified pursuits.
- Increasing their Probability of Winning (PWIN)
Consequently, VisibleThread is part of a comprehensive strategy aimed at increasing their P-Win (Probability of Win). Since its rollout, the platform has been seamlessly integrated into their workflow. As a result, they have significantly expanded their proposal capacity. In fact, the number of proposals they pursue annually has increased by nearly 200%, demonstrating its measurable impact on overall performance.
The importance of good vendor support
Fred calls out the hands-on support his team received from the VisibleThread Customer Success (CS) team. Throughout the process, the CS team work closely with Fred’s team, identifying new ways to apply the platform to optimize their end-to-end process. Thanks to this ongoing hands-on collaboration ensured the team gained full value from the platform, translating into sustained proposal efficiency. Ultimately, this means Pragmatics get significant value and ROI from their investment in VT Docs.
“Buying the right software is important, but what is even more important is making sure it’s effectively used by my team. The VisibleThread CS team were true partners during the rollout and continue to add significant value”.
Conclusion: Scaling Growth Through Proposal Efficiency
VT Docs had an immediate positive impact for the Pragmatics team in the first year of deployment. By driving increased proposal efficiency and improving quality across the proposal lifecycle, Pragmatics capacity to pursue bids has doubled.
“VisibleThread has helped us grow. The solution allows us to become a company that is agile in getting to a compliant & compelling bid. It helps us get some realism into what we are building from a proposal pipeline perspective. Now we can deliver a better-quality product, as well as ensuring compliance across the board.”
