The bid management process is time-consuming, intense, and tedious. With that said, it is also imperative to the longevity of your business and key part of every successful B2B organization.
Bid management teams can manage this process, but we know it is not always easy, and solutions exist to automate the most labor-intensive parts of the journey. AI-driven information insight provides the intelligence businesses need to assist their bid management teams and win more contracts for their company.
Suppose you look at the lifecycle of a tender; it looks like this:
A buyer lists a request, companies get notified, bid teams plan and prepare, bid writers compose and submit tender responses, the buyer evaluates the answers, and finally, the buyer awards the tender.
Where Does Artificial Intelligence Provide Value?
Planning, Preparation, and Research: The main goal of information insight (e.g. via an Insight Engine) is to put knowledge and information directly in the hands of your employees. During the research and planning phase of the tender process, this has tremendous value. That’s why using Artificial Intelligence to automate the bid management process is so important.
To recognize if you are a fit to bid, you need data from departments across your enterprise. These departments include but are not limited to research and development, upper management, administration, operations teams, and security.
By extracting data from data silos and divisions into a single application to search, a bid manager’s time spent on research is significantly reduced by completely cutting out the unknown of where to find specific knowledge. On top of this, your company will have the intelligence to recognize any showstoppers or shortcomings early on.
Writing Tender Responses: Natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation (NLG) are machine learning capabilities that have the power to understand and turn your data into human language. Many companies have multiple tenders they are bidding for at a single time, and each of these tenders could have upwards of a hundred questions. Winning business for your company is very competitive because there are always other bidders, so not adding a quality response to a single question could define the outcome of a contract. Thanks to NLP and NLG, you can worry less and spend less time on each questionnaire.
As alluded to before, an Insight Engine ingests all your content and data into a single application. Along with FAQs, blogs, whitepapers, and other business documents, an Insight Engine also takes data from previously written requests for proposals and information (RFPs and RFIs). The capability to analyze previous tenders and RFPs can tell your bid management team precisely what responses worked well in the past and what did not.
All a bid writer has to do is enter a question in the search field, and NLG will utilize all the data to generate a fitting response. You also can upload an entire form, and NLG can do the same thing for a whole document of questions.
More Reasons to Turn to Bid Automation
The goal of this all is to make your employees more productive and efficient while not sacrificing the growth of your business.
For particular questions, a bid writer will often have to ask a knowledge expert within their company for information. Knowledge experts are being utilized and have their hands in multiple projects across a corporation. Access to the full range of company data eliminates the need to turn to them, saving the bid writer time and the experts.
AI can also perform competitive analysis that gives insight into your competition bidding for the same contracts.
Organization and tracking are also vital in the intense bidding process. The process is highly deadline-oriented, and missing a step could undo all of AI’s hard work. That’s why we allow AI to help with this as well. An Insight Engine can show you on a graphical timeline where you stand, what steps need attention, and what is coming next. Which is key to using AI to automate the bid management process.
