Proposal Management using infoRouter

Using the infoRouter document and proposal management software, customers such as Lockheed Aerospace, Rockwell Collins, Northrop Grumman and Boeing generate and manage massive content for their proposals.

These proposals generally contain a huge number of pages, graphics and technical text. The development process involves the participation of many talents such as authors, graphics people, management specialists, engineers and many others and is generally treated as a major project management undertaking.

With hundreds of authors contributing content [sometimes worth billions of dollars], it is imperative that an enterprise class document management software is there to help.

As a part of the standard proposal development process, documents must go through extensive review cycles before they are released. The review process involves multiple passes of checks by different teams, each concerned with their specific areas.

The proposal review process

The different review steps may include the following checks:

• Font size
• Line spacing
• Page layout
• Graphics
• Accuracy of text (price, engineering, timing etc.)

Proposal development efforts always include a tight check-back mechanism to make sure that the final document adheres to the RFP (Request for Proposal). If documents are not developed according to the RFP, a simple oversight might be able to make the difference between a winning and losing proposal.

The proposal workflow

Setting up a simple workflow process in infoRouter solves this major hurdle.

• Author creates content
• Content is reviewed by Pink Team
• Content is reviewed by Red Team
• Content is reviewed by Gold Team
• Content is approved and published.

In the above example, the workflow is set up such that the review teams take turns reviewing the document. At each step of the review process, multiple individuals vote (approve or reject) on the document. If at any step, a document is rejected, the process stops and the document is returned to the author for changes and edits.

This process ensures that when a document makes it out of the review process in an approved state, it has been truly checked by multiple individuals for accuracy. infoRouter tracks all changes and votes and makes the tracking of changes simple.