Changes in the Global Business Environment

This is Part 2 of a series regarding the evolution of global business procurement. Read Part1 here (link).Evolution 2: How Large Enterprises Are Organized to Offer Complex Services and SystemsWhen Shipley was founded in 1972 in the U.S., our clients largely focused on winning government and B2B competitions in the U.S. However, as U.S. clients expanded globally, they increasingly asked Shipley to support their non-U.S. operations. In response, Shipley established offices around the globe, and now supports clients in local, regional, and international competitions.As our clients have grown, their business development issues have also evolved.Expansions, acquisitions, and mergers forced management to examine their business development processes. Diverse operations with differing processes impact how organizations are perceived by customers, as well as being inefficient, difficult to manage, and imparting increased risk. Defining processes, aligning processes, and then training employees in those processes is essential to compete globally, especially when clients are global and expect a professional business relationship.The optimal organization for bid support depends on many factors. Many sales or business development senior managers seek efficiencies by balancing bidding workload across operations, and placing support in locations offering improved quality and economies. Sophisticated bid support might originate in one country and less demanding support in another country, depending upon resource availability, quality, and cost. However, win rates and capture percentages are poor if these functions lack common processes, understanding, and complementary skills.In organizations where bid volume varies, integrated bid support helps balance workloads. Proposal teams that operate in different time zones might work while others sleep. However, managing geographically dispersed bid teams is challenging, especially when different processes, skills, quality standards, and cultures are involved.Management often consolidates solution development and proposal operations to reduce risk.Some customers “shop” bid requests, playing geographically dispersed operations against each other. The bidding organizations’ independent operations frequently offer different solutions, proposal quality, pricing, terms, and conditions. Not only does this increase risk and reduce profit margins, but it suggests that an organization that claims to be integrated is a loosely coordinated group of disparate operations.As global customers’ needs and solutions become increasingly complex, few organizations can offer the optimal solution and pricing without teaming with other organizations. Customers often specify the involvement of additional organizations—perhaps local, in-country, or small business—aimed at meeting specific social or development goals. Whatever the motivation, teaming is increasingly essential to capture global business opportunities.However, teaming presents additional challenges:

• One organization must manage bid preparation.
• Work share discussions may be contentious but essential.
• While the work share and work breakdown structure might be defined, the management approach is often generic, lacks credibility, and projects increased program risk to the customer’s evaluation team.

Teaming partners must adopt common processes and standards. If not, then one organization must prepare the entire bid, and the proposal seldom fully reflects the strength of the integrated team.