9 ways to ‘stack the deck’ to win that vital tender

9 ways to ‘stack the deck’ to win that vital tender

Jul 25, 2018 | Marketing, Operations, Sales, Uncategorized

 

The better prepared the tender, the better the chance of winning.

Hard to disagree with that statement, but then what makes for a better prepared tender?

While price has a role to play, it is only the deciding factor when all else is equal. Your task as a tenderer is to ensure that all else is not equal, and that your tender represents the best value to the enterprise wanting something  done. Then  you have stacked the deck!

A friend of mine is a senior engineer in a very large building contractor, one of those who is changing the skyline of Sydney on an almost daily basis.

The stress is killing him.

There is the constant need to keep the work flow of projects moving, identifying, preparing and winning tenders, then there is the stress that really kicks in as the construction side of the business tries to extract profit out of a ‘successful’ tender.

Talking to him I was reminded of Albert Einstein’s quote that ‘If I had an hour to fix a life defining problem, I would spend the first fifty minutes defining the problem, the rest is just maths’

When preparing a tender, the filling of the form is the maths. You have to get it right, all questions answered with quality copywriting, no spelling or punctuation errors, professional layout, but still just maths.

The key to winning is not in the maths, that is just table stakes, it is in the manner in which the vision of the contractor is reflected in the documents, the manner in which the tender you submit reflects value in the eyes of the judges. Each judge in the process will have a different definition of ‘Value’. The accountants will focus on cost, the engineers on the durability, regulatory and engineering integrity, the architects in the manner in which the construction reflects the aesthetic and functional innovations contained in their design, and the stakeholders in the return on investment, which is a function of both price to build and price that the construction can generate from buyers and users.

When you spend an extra $1 on the build that generates an extra $2 on the market value, the extra investment is a great one.

So what makes for a winning tender, that is also commercially successful as the job is completed?

Seems to me that the best measure is the degree to which the tenderer comes back and offers some sort of inside running for the next big project because of your performance in the last one or two

Tendering against someone who has that sort of inside running is usually a waste of time and money.

In the case of public infrastructure tenders, where price is a more important factor, you also have to manage the added complication of the nature of the bureaucratic processes and the politics of  the day.

Just ask Acciona, the Spanish firm who contracted to build the Sydney light rail project, which has become another infrastructure debacle. They seem to have taken the arguably inadequate tender docs literally, failed to do their own due diligence, quoted a price and time line, then found themselves in a billion dollar slanging match with the government.

When was the last time you saw a really complicated project RFQ that reflected all the complications that evolved during the construction?

So, how to stack the deck in your favour?

Perhaps a better way of putting it is to answer the question: ‘How can I quote the highest reasonable price, and still win the tender?

Know more about the project than the principal.

Understand what is really being requested. Most tender documents are dry tick the box type things that have nothing of the ‘humanity’ to which most projects are setting out to make a contribution. Focus on the humanity, and vision, not just the yes/no questions.

Understand the ‘vision’ of the principal.

Better yet, shape the vision, so that you can shape the guidelines of the tender docs to best suit your distinctive capabilities

Have relationships with all the ‘functional Buyers’ in the process.

It is always the case that there are a variety of roles played inside a tender process. Engineering, regulatory affairs, financial, architectural, and project management all will have a differing perspective of the end result, and the best route to get there. There is also always someone with the final call, a right of veto. Understanding the nuances of these functional variations, and accommodating them in the manner in which you approach both the documentation and the informal conversations that occur is vital.

Anticipate and leverage ‘Buyers’ personal inclinations.

The ‘buyers’ in the process, in addition to the functional bias, will have personal and emotional views about the best tender. Some will be for you, some against you, some ambivalent, and sometimes there is one prepared to ‘coach’ you on the side when you are a their preferred candidate. Being sensitive to these views, and leveraging them is often of critical importance.

Identify information holes.

No RFQ is ever complete, so identifying the ‘information holes’ not only gives you added credibility, it also gives you the opportunity to get a jump on competitors

Articulate any obvious shortcomings you may have.

Rarely would a tenderer be an absolutely perfect fit for a job, there will always be compromises that can be used as objections by those who may have an alternative favoured candidate. The best way to deal with objections is to raise them yourself, and deal with them. Once dismissed in this way, they generally cease to be valid objections.

Be proud of price.

Remember the old cliché ‘Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM’? It still applies. Human beings are always concerned with their own best interests, which correlates strongly to making as few mistakes as possible. Most are wary of the cheapest price, there is always a catch, either in the fine print, exclusions, or poorer quality, so there is always room to justify a reasonable price that delivers value but not at the rock bottom.

Tenders are competitions.

As in any competitive situation, the more you know about your competition, the better able you are to address their strengths and capitalise on their relative weaknesses. A tender process is not all about you, and your response, it is also about your response relative to the others in the race.

Attention to detail.

It is so obvious that it should not be in this list, but nevertheless, is often overlooked. Spelling and grammatical mistakes abound, as do simple editing errors, inadequately or unanswered questions, and an absence of simple but elegant and memorable graphic design. Make sure you do not repeat these mistakes of your competitors.

 

When you lose, as is inevitable from time to time, make sure you invest the time and effort in understanding why you lost, learn the lessons so the next time you are a step ahead.

Photo: industry.nsw.gov.au

 

 

Peer pressure destroys the power of Advertising

Peer pressure destroys the power of Advertising

Oct 11, 2017 | Change, Marketing, Operations, retail

The major consequence to marketers of the transfer of power from themselves to their customers is that the effectiveness of their marketing efforts has been deflated, irrespective of their mix of legacy and digital channels, by the power of peer pressure.

As a kid, yo-yos came and went several times, usually with the backing of Coke, as did hula hoops and several others, but the story of fidget spinners appears different.

They came from nowhere, a craze amongst teenagers fuelled by YouTube, that left behind all the usual corporate toymakers who have had to scramble to get their hands on stock, probably arriving about the time the craze will end, leaving them on the beach with warehouses of product the kids see as yesterday’s news.

The toy business, like many, has a rhythm that has evolved over many years. There are a couple of peak sales periods, and the promotion of new toys is aimed at these periods, with lead times of 12-18  months or more. These hierarchical toy marketers NPD cycle times bear no resemblance to the cycle times of the newest crazy thing that catches on.

Finger spinners appeared in the US in early 2017, and sales appeared to have peaked in May or June, and are now in decline, a decline as rapid as the rise. How do businesses geared around an 18 month product development and promotion cycle time compete in this new marketplace  powered by their consumers, not even their customers, who are often the kids parents. Kids went on line to buy these thing before the bricks and mortar retailers had heard of them. Perhaps this is the virus at the core of the recent move to Chapter 11 of Toys R Us, weighed down by a mountain of debt, just before the peak selling period.

This severely condensed cycle time is the new reality of consumer markets, and our legacy  hierarchical organisation structures are unable to accommodate the change. Instead, organisations need to find more ‘organic’ ways of responding to the stuff that goes on in their markets, to see the odd things at the fringe that might become the next big thing, and respond to them with an appropriately condensed supply chain cycle time.

It is not very often organisations will be faced with something as radically short term as fidget spinners, but the lesson is appropriate in all markets, as the disruption to one extent or another, is everywhere.  This condensation of the demand cycle, way out of the control of marketers, is a tectonic shift on the nature of markets and marketing in the 21st century to which adaptation is the key success metric.

 

 

 

Why Operational improvement and change initiatives usually fail.

Why Operational improvement and change initiatives usually fail.

Aug 2, 2017 | Change, Leadership, Lean, Operations

How do you make short term operational and process improvements ‘stick’ for the long term?

Most change initiatives fail to deliver on their early promise. You get some short term improvement, some changes made, but the effectiveness of the process dwindles with time.

I often see failed improvement initiatives, usually labelled ‘Lean” or ‘6 Sigma’ by those involved, that leave a pile of paper, some awareness and knowledge, and from time to time some useful results, but nothing like the promises of the expensive consultants as they signed you up.

Why is that?

Nobody goes into a change process expecting it to fail

In my observation, the single most common reason these initiatives fail is because they ignore one of the basic tenets of Lean: respect for people.

Lean gets a start because management sees problems they have failed to solve, or do not know how to solve. So they bring in some Lean consultants who reach into the tool box and come out with some of the common tools, go through an education process, implement, and get some quick and sometimes impressive wins, and victory is declared. After that declaration, the focus moves elsewhere,  and the process slowly deteriorates.

Why is that?

Everyone was so committed, excited at the early results, the consultants were paid a shedload, so it should have worked.

In 30 years of doing this stuff, there is always one dominant reason they fail.

The initiative is top down, not bottom up.

Those at the top see problems manifest in the P&L. Their motivations are financial, operational and strategic. They talk about alignment, and people being the most valuable asset, then ignore them.

By contrast, building initiative from the bottom, asking those doing the work how to improve it, then giving them the tools to improve, and rewarding them with acknowledgement as well as a more secure job and maybe a pay rise, is where the action is.

However, for managers, they are trained to see their job as managing. Having some stuff bubbling up from the factory that has not gone through the formal approval processes and subjected to the discipline of  the accountants mandatory NPV  and ROI analysis is uncomfortable and challenging to their authority as managers.

This is where the distinction between managers and leaders comes in.

Managers, usually unwittingly, kill off the grass roots enthusiasm to make their workplace safer, more interesting, and more productive because it makes them uncomfortable, less in control.  By imposing rules, they interrupt the productive flow evident in successful initiatives. By contrast,  leaders encourage and promote the ambiguity that sometimes results, and works with it.

Which are you, Manager or Leader?

 

 

The simple 4 letter word that underpins every improvement initiative.

The simple 4 letter word that underpins every improvement initiative.

Jul 24, 2017 | Governance, Lean, Operations

Improving the performance of businesses is often like being set loose in a commercial kitchen without a recipe. Random ingredients, absence of some staples, disaffected staff, erratic processes, and severe cost pressures, but still being expected to produce an experience people are prepared to pay for.

Not easy

However, every time I look back on a project, the common factor that has made the most difference is not what you would expect.

It is not the financials, or the marketing plan, or how well the sales force performed, it is more basic than all that, and enables all those things:

Flow.

Simple word, and an idea at the core of all performance improvement.

The concept of flow emerged from the work done to improve manufacturing processes by W. Edwards Deeming, Joseph Juran, and others, and was first widely implemented and documented by Toyota, then spread around the world as ‘Lean thinking’ and the ‘Toyota Production System’.

At the core of Lean is Flow, and at the core of any improvement in any process, physical or otherwise,  in any context, is flow.

The basic confusion is between being busy, and being productive. Jumping up and down in one spot may be  busy, but it is hardly productive unless you are killing ants.

Optimising flow in manufacturing operations requires the configuration of all the lines such that work passes unobstructed from job centre to job centre through to completion. The faster and more uninterrupted the flow, the higher the output.

Flow optimisation always requires the counter intuitive decision to leave unused capacity at points in the process, to avoid building Work in progress inventory, which act as ‘rapids’ in the flow metaphor. It usually feels wrong to leave available capacity unused, but the slowest work centre will be the limiting factor for  the whole process, and to keep the flow steady, the flow rate is limited by that slowest point. In addition, shit always happens, something breaks, an item spec ‘wanders, ingredient fails to come in as required, so there is always downtime of some sort. This means that  some spare capacity in the system is a requirement for  the flow to be matched to demand, or ‘Pull’ in Lean parlance.

A key component of flow is the orderly release of work into the process. A schedule is written based on priority and optimal flow, and is then executed without change. Queue jumping, to meet unscheduled customer expectations, is a common distraction from the plan that multiplies, disrupts everything, and often results in total turmoil in the flow. It is deadly to process optimisation.

These days, not as much manufacturing is done, after all many of us are told we are now knowledge workers.

Exactly the same principals apply. While it may be harder to see because there is no physical product moving down a production line, the thought process is identical.

The trouble with these non physical tasks, is that they come at us from every direction, often with little warning and lead time, and with ambiguous importance and priority. Unscheduled demands on our time.

How do you sort through the mess to optimise your productivity?

A now standard method is the scaling of Importance and urgency into quadrants. When analysing how our time is spent, most of us find that too much is spent in the not important/urgent quadrant, when we should be focusing on the important items, urgent or otherwise. It is almost always the important/not urgent tasks that get shuffled aside, and it is these items that have the greatest long term impact on the performance of an enterprise.

An alternative means to allocate time is on an ‘Impact/Effort’ continuum. Tasks that are high impact, low effort are the quick wins so beloved of consultants, by contrast, high effort, low impact tasks are just thankless tasks, and not worth doing.

Everyone is in charge of managing their time to some extent, the further away you are from a time driven physical process, the greater the amount if discretion you will have. It behoves you to work the tasks in front of you in order of priority. Responding to that email may seem important, after all it has come in, the ‘new email bleep’ (Pavlov would love this one were he still alive) has sounded, there is a sense of urgency generated, but in 99% of cases, what does it really matter of the email goes unopened.

In everything you do, consider the impact and benefits of optimising Flow.

Photo credit  Dirk Veltkamp: Thredbo river.

 

1 very simple question to radically improve performance.

1 very simple question to radically improve performance.

Mar 29, 2017 | Change, Operations

Do not ask who, ask why.

Piles have been written about changing culture as the means to improve performance.

Most of it misses the point.

Learning organisations, teams, mutual obligation, and all the rest, but when it comes down to it, the core is about people wanting to, being able to, and being acknowledged as doing a good, and worthwhile job.

It does not matter if you are the managing director, or the cleaner, both are there for a set of pretty common reasons, and high amongst them is to do a good job.
Nobody, not even the most militant and unreasonable ‘rabble-rouser’ ever went to work to do a bad job.

The task of the organisation is to organise to get the best, most cost efficient, most customer value specific job done and delivered, and in most cases that requires people.

Therefore the task of management, and everybody involved should be focussed on removing the impediments to getting that job done, and having an engaged and responsive work force that gets the job done better than  competitors.

Only then can you be commercially sustainable.

Years ago, (mid eighties) involved in the early production of a new dairy plant which amongst other products made yoghurt, we used to watch the huge waste bins being carted away, several a day, day after day, a seemingly  intractable set of quality problems was costing millions.

Even worse, the office and management staff could see the waste, and lost confidence and heart.

In the midst of the turmoil, I watched one day as bad product was being pumped out of the batching tanks into the system that mixed in the fruit components, and was then sent to the form & fill packaging machine to be packed, to be sent to the waste bin.

When I raced around to get the machine stopped before it was mixed with the fruit, I was told to nick off, the system could not be stopped mid stride, there was  no choice but to knowingly add substantial cost to a poor product that would cost us to throw out.

After some heated exchanges, the whole system was closed down, and I presided over an impromptu meeting I convened almost by force on the factory floor to figure out the cause of the problem. As I was the marketing and sales manager, this was theoretically way outside my formal jurisdiction, but I was the one taking all the customer calls about bad quality and short delivery, and a key KPI was margin, so the bad product was really hurting the formal measures of my performance.

The production manager and supervisory people were seriously pissed, as their KPI’s were all about throughput, nothing about quality, customers or cost.

The meeting was a very unpleasant finger pointing exercise, nobody was to blame, and yet, everyone was to blame, but it was the beginning of an improvement process that led to the plant becoming a world class plant over the following couple of years.

At the core of the improvement was the conversion of the previous procedure of blaming a problem on someone other than yourself, to investigating and fixing the causes of the problems at source.

The tool used extensively was a version of what has become known as ‘5 why’. It replaced what we began to call the failed ‘5 who’ with the genuine investigation and remediation of  the root cause of problems.

The lesson, always Ask why, not who.

 

The differences between Takt and cycle time, and why they are important.

The differences between Takt and cycle time, and why they are important.

Jan 11, 2017 | Lean, Operations

 

‘Job shops’ have particular challenges in production planning and capacity utilisation.

No two jobs are exactly the same, so the sequencing of jobs to optimise factory utilisation takes on even more importance.

In the middle of an operational improvement project in a job shop environment with multiple possible routes for a given job, I found myself having a regular conversation with the factory management and machine operators about creating a sense of ‘flow’ through the factory, and how that related to machine cycle time, total process time,  and Takt time.

There were multiple definitions of cycle, depending on who I was talking to, but none had any idea of what Takt time was.

Therefore I followed my own advice to ensure that as a first step, the language in any factory was absolutely common. This ensures that the meaning meant to be conveyed by specific words were exactly the way they were received.

Cycle time.

Cycle time has many definitions depending on circumstances. In effect it is the time taken to do one cycle of a specified task. The cycle time of production of a Boeing 747 is many months, whereas the cycle time for production of a specific part may be hours. Both are valid definitions, so ensuring that the definitions being used in your context are exactly the same is essential.

In my job shop, there are many routes for a completed job via a range of different machinery, each with its own limitations.

A job may be done on a machine that produces  5/minute, a cycle time of 12 seconds, or a machine that does 60/minute, a cycle time of 1 second. Make sure you are talking of the same machine when discussing the routing.

The cycle time of a particular completed job may have a number of separate processes that require both a specific order and potentially variable routing, so knowing the cycle times of each machine option, and other limitations, such as manning, that may apply is essential.

Takt time.  (derived from the German ‘Taktzeit’ referring to a musical beat measured by a metronome)

Takt time is similarly subject to differing interpretations, but less so than cycle time.

The classic definition of Takt time is:

Available time for production/Required units for production. In other words, the time required to meet demand.

This is exactly right, but the confusion usually occurs in the definition of ‘available time’

Assuming a normal 8 hour day, we start with 8 hours X 60 minutes = 480 minutes.

However, there will also be standard times during the day when the machine is not available. For example, it may take 15 minutes to be set up in the morning, then there are 2 x 10 minute ‘smoko’ breaks during the day, a 30 minute lunch break, and a 40 minute wash up at the end of the day.

The available time then becomes: 480 – 15 – (2 x 10)-30-40 = 375 minutes/day.

This ‘down time’ might be managed by having split times for lunch and start-up/wash up, and would change the Takt time calculation, but essentially to be simple there are 375 minutes available in the day. This becomes the base for the Takt time calculations.

Let’s assume that the customer demand was for 50 units. You then have 375 minutes to produce 50 completed products, or an available time/unit of 7.5 minutes.

Let’s further assume that the product takes  8 minutes /unit to produce, you are therefore  30 seconds short per unit, or 25 minutes over the course of a normal day. This is typically made up with overtime used to produce the 50th unit, or producing only 49 units, which annoys the customer of the 50th who are short or late delivered.

The additional problem is the backlog of back orders builds up, resulting in customers cancelling, going elsewhere, or just losing confidence in you.

None are outcomes you would wish for.

In addition, there are always unexpected things that happen, a machine goes down, a well-meaning manager walks through talking to operators and slows down the speed, a productivity improvement meeting is called, and so on. All this impacts on the available time, but the customer demand does not vary from 50 units/day.

The operational improvement task, often referred to as ‘Lean Thinking’ is to apply continuous improvement to both the available machine time, and time required to produce the unit, so that it eventually matches the Takt time of demand.

Most factories I have seen have no idea of takt time, and many see no need for it, but it has several benefits.

  • It makes capacity calculations relatively easier, even through a complex set of sub processes. By calculating the capacity and cycle time of each process, and the alternative routes that may be available, the best fit to the demand is exposed.
  • It enables the calculation of the best batch sizes to be done.
  • It gives team members an idea of what ‘well done’ looks like for every bit of production, an enormously valuable outcome.
  • It acts as an early warning system of an emerging problem.

Understanding the two times, Cycle and Takt enables a clear sense of priority that can be applied to planning the sequences of jobs, and an understanding the total and local (individual process) capacity utilisation necessary  to be of maximum service to customers.

When you have that clarity, you can address the opportunities for improvement, leading to a greater sense of ‘flow’ through the factory.