Projectal: The Secret to Better Project Bidding
Bidding basics
When a customer asks you a quote on a project, your company must analyze the customer's requirements and quickly determine the following:
* How long will this project take?
* How much will this project cost to complete?
* Do we have staff and resources available to complete this project?
* If we take on this project, how much will it affect our other projects?
* The customer has a fixed price. Can we make money on this project?
* The customer has a fixed deadline. Can we complete this project in time?
The Problem: When project bidding is based on guesswork
The most common way when creating a project bid is to simply estimate your project bid based on guesswork.
This relies on staff being experienced, not making mistakes, remembering all previous projects and remembering the tasks, times and costs for a project. In medium-to-large projects, this is very difficult, time consuming and error prone since there just too many factors to get right.
Guesswork often leads to projects bids that have the wrong amounts of money or time quoted to complete the project. And, this leads to your business not being awarded projects or losing money on projects.
The Solution: Projectal takes the guesswork out of project bidding
Projectal has all the tools to help you create accurate bids for all your upcoming projects.
No longer is bidding based on simple guesswork or using bespoke spreadsheets.
Extensive bidding features have been incorporated into Projectal from the ground up.
Say goodbye to project bidding using Excel spreadsheets
No more copy and pasting. No more hidden formulas. No more magic numbers. No more 100 different versions of the same bidding spreadsheet used across your company. No more questions - "Where did those time and cost numbers come from?"
Projectal replaces your Excel spreadsheets. Don't worry - everything you currently do with your bidding spreadsheets, you can also do in Projectal. Including assigning complexity, estimated durations, estimated costs, assigning staff (real staff or generic staff with experience levels & gang rates), tax incentives (rebates) and much more.
You can see all project costs and estimated durations in real time.
You can quickly conduct "what-if" scenarios to see how changing various factors will affect the time and costs on a project bid.
You can share and work on your project bids with other staff in your company so that you have a single, centralized project bid.
You can export your project bids from Projectal as XLS documents so that you can prepare your customer-facing bid proposals.
Fast turnaround: Reduce project bid turnaround from 2 weeks to 1 day.
Projectal has many time-saving features that dramatically cut the time it takes to do your project bidding.
There is no more manual copy and pasting data from customer bid documents into your Excel spreadsheets. Projectal automatically imports your customer bid documents. Projectal uses Machine Learning (ML) to automatically detect fields of interest in customer bid documents so that you can create a project bid within minutes. And, the more customer bid documents that you import into Projectal, the more Projectal learns about the key fields of interest that you use in your project bids.
Changing your project bid is quick and easy in Projectal. You can set attributes to tasks such complexity, estimated duration, skills required, staff assigments and more. You can quickly change any attribute to see the real-time effect on project time and costs.
Heuristics: The key to more reliable and accurate project bids
Task templates in Projectal are heuristics. They will quickly become the most trusted and used components when you are project bidding.
When you get started with Projectal, you will create task templates that represent snippets of work required to complete parts of a project. You can re-use these task templates time and time again in your project bids. They will give your full confidence that you have taken all factors into account when project bidding - including estimated durations, estimated costs, skills required, staff required, experience required, resources required, deadlines and much more.
Better project bids = smoother projects and better profit margins
If you get better at your project bids, then your business benefits in so many ways.
* Sustained profitability on projects.
* Reduced chance of project blowouts.
* Keeps your team allocated at all times.
* Lets you plan ahead including hiring staff, contractors and equipment.
* Removes individual bias and guesswork when bidding.
* Makes for informed decision making — i.e. "Should we take this project on or not?"
Want to know more?
See https://projectal.com/features/bidding for full details about project bidding with Projectal.