NATIONAL CONSTRUCTION COMPANY

Qualified Wins: Process and Platforms Transform Bidding and Reduce Risk for Construction Services Firm

The Client

The Strategic Project Qualification (“SPQ”) and risk management process for a billion-dollar national construction company needed an overhaul and migration from their legacy forms, workflow and collaboration platform. Netrix optimized the business process and risk assessment by building a new, more efficient solution on the Microsoft Office 365 and Nintex Workflow platforms.

The Challenge

In any sized construction business, great resources, effort, and expense go into identifying new project opportunities and their risk factors. This leading construction services company’s Risk Management team (including their CEO) carefully evaluates every opportunity to determine whether to bid the project or forego it based on several important factors. This business-critical process helps the firm bid on projects it has the best chance to win and that present the least amount of risk, minimizing time and money spent on lower-percentage, high-risk, and high-value bids and work.

The firm’s legacy solution for collecting data and qualifying projects was built on outdated, soon-to-be-unsupported technology and constituted a number of manual steps, making it inefficient and costly to support and utilize. Having recently worked with Netrix to roll out Office 365 and SharePoint online, the firm chose to build the new solution on the same platform and engaged Netrix to design and implement it.

The Solution

Netrix worked with the Risk Management team to map out a new, more efficient SPQ process and implement a solution on Office 365 online. Netrix advised the firm to build the solution’s forms, workflow, and document generation on the Nintex advanced workflow and intelligent process automation platform.

The Netrix team engineered a solution with several improved components. First, a detailed SPQ form built on the dynamic Nintex platform was created and allowed risk management staff to attach documents and other valuable project artifacts to help qualify the risk of each bid. Next, an auto- mated data collection workflow based on a user-managed business rules engine was created that notifies select team members when there are new opportunities to review. This step would help ensure the right stakeholders are properly engaged with the right projects, at the right time during the process.

To streamline the all-hands Bid/Risk Review meetings and process, the solution automated the generation of a project specific .PDF document that summarizes bid risk factors. Document templates can be managed by business users and bid risk data is auto-populated at runtime when the document is generated ensuring the latest inputs are readily available for the team’s assessment.

Finally, dynamic Power BI dashboards added powerful business intelligence capabilities to provide status and insights into the bid process and risk data stored in Share- Point Online. This step ensures key data points, assumptions, and lessons learned are captured and leveraged for future project qualifications.

The new solution streamlines the SPQ process by reducing data entry and data duplication, allowing the Risk Management team to spend more time collaborating throughout the process rather than assembling content required for it. The solution helps better prepare the risk management team for Bid/Risk Review meetings, arming them with critical documentation that is generated automatically without requiring staff to assemble the documentation manually from the data collected during the bid review process. The end-to-end solution has transformed the firm’s project qualification and risk assessment process and will enable ongoing improvement as well as valuable insights and data to serve the firm’s future.

The Result

Pains

  • Legacy technology no longer supported by IT.
  • Duplicate data entry and inefficient workflow didn’t match the current business process.
  • Manual processes were required to prepare documents for the Bid/Risk Review with the CEO.
  • Lack of reporting on previous, similar opportunities which could be used to improve responses to future opportunities.

Gains

  • New solution built on existing Office 365 intranet platform provided consistent navigation, single sign-on, and security.
  • Workflow improved with single data entry point and reusable info throughout the entire process.
  • Automatic generation of documents required for Bid/Risk Review meetings.
  • Improved reporting capabilities on previous opportunities for preparing future qualifications.

Experience The Impact

No matter what challenge you’re facing today, our team of technical experts can get you started on a path to a better solution. We’ll partner with you to: 

  • Understand your current technology environment
  • Interview key stakeholders to understand the root of the business issue(s)
  • Propose a solution with projected timelines, budget, and dependencies