- Health Care Organization
Customer Success Stories
How Pragmatics improved their proposal efficiency and increased compliance with VisibleThread
Head Quarters
Reston, Virginia, USA
Size of Company
130+ Employees
Industry
IT Services
Customer Success Stories
How Pragmatics improved their proposal efficiency and increased compliance with VisibleThread
Head Quarters
Reston, Virginia, USA
Size of Company
130+ Employees
Industry
IT Services
Fred Vlchek is the Director of Business Development (BD) Operations at Pragmatics. He is a seasoned senior leader with over 20 years of success in Business Development and Proposal Management. Fred has led multi-functional teams in all areas of proposal development. He manages an agile, functionally capable team of five in Business Development at Pragmatics. Fred has driven the transformation of internal processes to optimize resourcing. This has yielded the highest win percentage for new pursuits.
About Pragmatics
“Innovative solutions that meet mission-critical needs.”
Pragmatics, Inc is a leading Cloud, Development, Security & Operations (DevSecOps) and Data solutions provider. These solutions operate in a range of industries, from Software & Systems Engineering, Business Intelligence to Cybersecurity, Program Management, and Transportation.
Pragmatics combines the latest cloud offerings with their streamlined DevSecOps processes. This accelerates their client’s journey through their digital transformation, modernization, and cloud migration. Their data scientists & engineers collaborate with clients to identify and leverage new patterns, insights, and predictive analytics.
These insights are gathered through advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms, approaches, and tools. Pragmatics brings together an enterprise vision with deep technical expertise for comprehensive client solutions.
The Challenges
Pragmatics were looking for a more streamlined way to bid on pursuits. They needed to improve the use of their time to make better bid decisions. After completing an internal process audit, they discovered three main areas of change needed to move new business development forward:
1. Forecasting Pipeline
Their existing process did not allow their teams to consistently identify opportunities to forecast and build quality pipeline.
2. Writing a compliant & compelling narrative
As a small proposal development team, ensuring any written narrative was compliant and compelling against the requirements of any RFP, SOW, PWS or SOO was a tremendous time drain.
3. Manual time drain
The lack of automation software and systems in place was a major inhibitor to growth and scalability due to the manual time drain on available resources.
“To find those pieces in the narratives, in the pricing, and in the win themes is huge. Now, we are able to build a more quality product. Ultimately, it leads to a higher P-Win.”
VisibleThread is a time saver, it really is. It helps us to take our limited resources and focus on where we should be putting our dollars to maximize the most benefit for our company.
The Solution
The Pragmatics team began researching several proposal automation software vendors to solve these issues. Having worked with VisibleThread in other organizations Fred Vlchek, Director of Business Development Operations at Pragmatics knew the value of VT Docs. Fred’s past experience with the VisibleThread Customer Success (CS) Team was a differentiating factor also. He knew they would provide guidance and mentorship for solution integration and overall successful deployment.
Once installed, Pragmatics adjusted their process to incorporate VT Docs to shred the proposal and create the initial compliance matrix. This gave the company a standardized means of creating the initial delivery articles and governance over their development.
As their skills with VT grew, the team began generating Acronym Lists and Readability Reports and incorporating them into the development process also. Fred highlighted these key features of VT Docs that helped to deeper automate the generation of all proposal documentation. This significantly reduced the time an individual needed to spend ‘hands-on’ a document.
After implementing the process changes, the Pragmatics team started using VisibleThread to help qualify new business opportunities. They began to build concept dictionaries aligned to their business verticals and the ‘Take to Market’ vision of the company. This enabled Pragmatics to quickly take a large amount of RFP/SOW/SOO/PWS items from a large number of contract areas and score them against their company capabilities. This resulted in more focused and better-quality pipeline to guide where they focus their resources. In addition, they were able to quickly adjust to industry trends and individual customer needs by simply editing or quickly creating new concept dictionaries.
The Impact
In the first year of rollout, the quality, time, and efficiency gained allows the Pragmatics team to reduce SOW / RFI response turn time, freeing the team up to add more strategic value. This manifested itself in several ways:
- Value-add to the business development and proposal process
VT Docs use is now a fundamental to the Pragmatics business development and proposal delivery process. It has assisted with all elements of proposal development; from speaking the customers language, to reducing stress for writers worrying about formatting and acronyms. Generating starter compliance matrices and being able to map them straight across to RFP’s is invaluable to the Pragmatics team.
- Assisting the qualification process
When making bid / no-bid decisions the use of Concept Tracking has helped them to initially qualify potential opportunities that align with their company capabilities. Pragmatics customize these dictionaries, tailoring them with specific terminology that aligns with their market pillars. This generates a heat map where these terms are heavily used across multiple RFP’s. This helps Pragmatics in their bid prioritization and increases their chance of success by focusing on more aligned & qualified pursuits.
- Increasing their Probability of Winning (PWIN)
VisibleThread is part of a full strategy for helping increase their P-Win (Probability of Win). Since rolling out VisibleThread, they have increased the number of proposals they pursue annually by close to 200%.
The importance of good vendor support:
Fred calls out the hands-on support his team received from the VisibleThread Customer Success (CS) team. The CS team work closely with Fred’s team, identifying new ways to apply the platform to optimize their end-to-end process. This means Pragmatics get significant value and ROI from their investment in VT Docs.
“Buying the right software is important, but what is even more important is making sure it’s effectively used by my team. The VisibleThread CS team were true partners during the rollout and continue to add significant value”.
Conclusion
VT Docs had an immediate positive impact for the Pragmatics team in the first year of deployment. By driving increased efficiency and improving quality across the proposal lifecycle, Pragmatics capacity to pursue bids has doubled.
“VisibleThread has helped us grow. The solution allows us to become a company that is agile in getting to a compliant & compelling bid. It helps us get some realism into what we are building from a proposal pipeline perspective. Now we can deliver a better-quality product, as well as ensuring compliance across the board.”
More Case Studies
- Government Contracting
