Measurability is the first step towards a modern bid organisation

Modernising an organisation is an exciting time. It comes with its own challenges, but it's often a period when the team jointly reflects on ways of working, questions established routines, and tests new methods.

In this article we cover an important first step for bid organisations that want to work smarter. It's time to build a modern bid organisation, and that journey starts with measurability.

To measure is to understand

Much has been said about measuring. "What isn't measured doesn't exist," as the saying goes. But one thing remains clear: measuring reveals things that would otherwise be hard to see.

When a bid organisation starts incorporating measurability into its processes, it inevitably generates new insights. Some may feel obvious, others identify problems you sensed but couldn't quite articulate. Good organisational development starts with understanding how the organisation functions today.

Bid organisations often lack measurability

Many bid organisations are skilled at the craft – reading procurement documents and hunting for mandatory requirements – but the processes are often tangled and hard to get visibility into.

Procurement data isn't measurable

The problem starts with the procurements themselves, which largely consist of unwieldy PDF documents and complicated Excel files. The information has to be manually compiled, which increases the risk it isn't done, is done inconsistently, or is done incorrectly.

Internal ways of working mirror outdated procurement methods

Mandatory requirements are hunted down with a highlighter on printed documents. At best, information is compiled in spreadsheets that quickly become outdated.

Too many different systems prevent transparency and overview

Monitoring platforms, procurement databases, inboxes, spreadsheets, Teams and Slack are all supposed to keep the work organised together, but rarely succeed.

Lack of measurable data hinders goals and development

Without measurable data on bid work, it's hard to set useful goals. Beyond the number of procurements won, you actually know very little about how the work is going.

Getting started measuring bid work

It can feel overwhelming to start building measurability in an organisation that currently lacks it. But taken one step at a time, this too can be overcome.

The most important data to measure

• How many procurements are reviewed in monitoring feeds.

• A history of the process for each procurement handled.

• Which bid processes are dropped before a tender is submitted, and why.

• Which tenders are submitted and whether they lead to a contract.

• Contract value, procurement type, and other relevant information.

• Which colleagues work on what, at each stage of the process.

Examples of bid-work analysis

• What in the bid process takes a lot of time and resources.

• What the team's workload looks like.

• How much time is spent on tenders that are never submitted.

• What an average bid process costs and how long it takes.

Improvements that can follow from the analysis

• Better decisions on which procurements are relevant to bid on.

• A review of the processes that consume a lot of time and resources.

• Better overview, workload distribution, and planning within the team.

• Development of better KPIs and internal goals.

Tendium is built for measurability

Manually compiling, updating, and analysing data on a bid organisation's work would be both time-consuming and inefficient. Tendium is built with data and measurability at its core – by working in Tendium from monitoring through to a finished tender, much of the team's work is automatically documented by the system.

Besides measurability around the team's work, Tendium also unlocks the data within the procurement documents themselves by extracting and sorting all information with the help of AI, making it possible to work data-driven at every stage of the bid process.

Want to know more about the benefits of working in Tendium? Book a demo and we'll show you.