One of our defense industry clients was a small company that had been purchased by one of the major aerospace and defense prime contractors. The new subsidiary retained the autonomy to choose its own business systems. The parent company is not a ProPricer licensee, relying instead on an in-house developed application.
The company needed to respond to a complex major system acquisition RFP issued by the US Navy. They had very little time to make a decision – the proposal’s RFP was scheduled for release in less than a month. The organization was new to government contracting by negotiation – they had literally never prepared a competitive cost proposal with cost and pricing data and had never prepared a detailed project cost estimate – every prior exercise had relied on Excel spreadsheets. The company’s Chief Financial Officer hurriedly compared the parent company’s proposal pricing application with ProPricer and decided to purchase ProPricer Standard Edition and ProPricer Estimator Edition. They also engaged with us to provide on-site user training, remote user training, implementation consulting and proposal preparation consulting.
The parent company supported the proposal process by sending a number of cost estimators and cost proposal preparation experts to the subsidiary’s site. None of the estimators or pricers had prior experience with ProPricer software. On-site and remote ProPricer Consulting helped bridge the hands-on experience gap. ProPricer Consulting was engaged shortly before the final RFP was issued. As expected, the early consulting efforts included matching the ProPricer setup to the organization’s cost accounting disclosure statement. But we also worked with cost proposal managers to plan the project pricing structures based on analysis of the RFP required outputs.
During the proposal preparation process, ProPricer Consulting was on-site and worked directly with company management, the cost proposal managers, the proposal pricers, and the functional estimators.
Despite the complete lack of hands-on experience, despite an aggressive accelerated implementation schedule, despite very little evaluation or implementation testing, and despite the need to respond to complex, system-level proposal pricing requirements — the company’s first use of ProPricer was a successful response to the Navy’s RFP. Their cost proposal is compliant to the RFP’s requirements and includes ProPricer generated basis of estimate (BOE) reports and a very large number of cost reports (both electronic and hardcopy), and a number of formula-rich ProPricer proposal pricing worksheets.
