Implementing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in Proposal Management

Today, Robotics or Bots is the highly tossed and frequently discussed in technology world. Robotics Technocrats and Industry Experts (Functional Consultants) are teaming together for discovering best possible tactics to implement RPA within the industry.

As far as what I know and what I have done within Proposal Management throughout my career of 20 years, I understand that there are following few areas where RPA can be implemented for Proposal Management. The below mentioned RFPA Use Cases are in tune with the process flow of Proposal Management.

Opportunity Capture & Search: RPA can be implemented if your Proposal or Bid Department if is involved in searching Tenders, RFPs. If searching RFPs, Tenders is the inhouse function of your Bid or Tender Department and you have not outsourced it to the external agency, RPA can be used for pulling published data from multiple websites where such opportunities are published. This pulled data can be extracted to Excel and then can be further filtered for next processing.

This website can be Government or Corporate websites, where they published or float such tenders, RFPs or projects. For e.g. beta.SAM.gov. for US Government Solicitations & RFPs, eprocure.gov.in for Indian Government Tenders (Central & State). One can use any website to pull such data using specific key words to your business interest.

Many Tender Information Service Providers are using such tools to serve their customers by providing daily dosage of such information by emails or thru their own portals.

Here Keywords, Criteria for search plays a critical role to have most of the information and not to miss any important opportunity.

Proposal or Bid Team only has to look for such daily summarized opportunity list. Once you have Excel or list of such summarized opportunities, one can further download or access RFP or Tender documents for next action.

If your Organization has implemented any Proposal Management Tool or CRM, you can use such Excel to have quick uploads or populate the Management Tool.

Extracting data from PDFs, scanned documents and other formats: Once such RFP is received or downloaded in form of Word or PDF, Proposal or Tender or Bid Team has to read, analyse and summarise the data somewhere. Key Dates, Commercial Terms, Legal Terms, Scope of Work, Project Background, Customer Background, Project Requirements, Deliverables, required Resourcing, Eligibility or Prequalification Criteria, Evaluation Criteria, etc. can be searched, inserted or populated automatically using RPA Screen scraping, OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and basic pattern recognition technologies, which enable data extraction from almost any format, reducing the need for keying in data.

This helps to have an opportunity specific brief document as a ready reckoner for future use. Also this can be automatically used to upload or populate your Management Tool or CRM.

Generating mass emails: It is very important to share the documents well in advance or as an when received because many strategic inputs are required to be received from concerned departments. Bid/No Bid Decisions, Queries Submission, attaining Pre-Bid Meetings, etc is to be decided. As a next action, once a Proposal or Bid Team receives the RFP, he/she has to distribute the document for responses from various stakeholders whose efforts are required in proposal. Majorly, it is done by sending multiple emails to various department of the organization for approvals, scope related inputs, pricing, project resourcing. This will be totally a human-dependent activity. This also can be done by using RPA. RPA can fire emails to multiple stakeholders with specific information, which is required to be shared including attachments of RFP documents or tenders. It is similar to Auto generated emails from various systems.

Project Resource Sourcing: There is always a requirement of Resources, which is required to be proposed in every response document. Also, there are certain evaluation criteria for such project resource requirements, which decides the winning. Organization has to propose most compatible resource and they has to look for the same within the organization or outside and has to submit relevant CVs along with the proposal. Organizations relying on legacy HR systems can use bots to automate aggregating CVs, assessment results using bots. RPA bots can search relevant resources from Job Portals, if it is to be sourced from outside of the organization. Bid Managers/Proposal Managers can have a summarized list of such resources and further their CVs can be downloaded based on shortlisting or filtering.

Periodic report preparation and dissemination: Every business requires regular reports to inform managers and ensure team are aware of their progress. Preparing such reports and sending them over every week or month is not labor intensive but it distracts employees. RPA solutions can easily auto-generate reports, analyze their contents and based on the contents, email them to relevant stakeholders. RPA bots can analyze reports to modify recipients according to provided criteria.

Orchestration of the above-mentioned few RPA use cases in its entirety or partially can save considerable amount of time and provide accuracy, which ultimately help Bid Managers, Proposal Managers, Tender Managers, RFP Managers, etc. to concentrate on core tasks for Proposal Department. At this stage, I only prefer to implement RPA for non-core activities of Bid & Proposal Management, few of which described above.

I request to list, provide details of specific RPA tolls, which if you have already used. You can provide links or share documented scripts or specific Use Cases, which you have used or can be used for Proposal Function in COMMENT section.

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