Improve Your Success and Win Rates on Task Order Based Contracts

Many government contractors we talk to are regularly taking stock of what works, what doesn’t and what potential improvement areas best fit their acquisition strategies. And if one of your goals is to improve win rates on task order procurements or to enhance your urgent bid decision making on task order procurements, then you are not alone. Deltek’s research conducted on over 270,000 task/delivery orders across more than 70 contract vehicles shows that response times for multi-million dollar task orders are often required in days, not weeks or months, driving a need for rapid decisions on teaming, bid/no-bid and proposal development.

That’s why we created Opportunity Manager – GovWin’s industry-leading GWAC and IDIQ management tool, custom-built to give your team time back and to take control of your task order response process.

Why Did GovWin Develop Opportunity Manager?

The short answer is because, in recent years, agency dependence on task order awards is growing and this shows little signs of slowing down. In analyzing spending by the federal government, one of the very distinct trends GovWin analysis has revealed is the federal government’s increasing and heavy reliance on task order based contacts. In FY 2018, for example, spending on task orders made up greater than 50% of the total dollars spent by the federal government on products and services.

Your Time Spent on Task Order Response is Precious

Another thing our research analysts uncovered in analyzing task order activity is that, typically, BD and proposal teams have less than two weeks response time to submit a response for a task order notice. Inherent to this time crunch, there are numerous challenges contractors must be mindful of in order to maximize success:

1. Avoid missing task order opportunities simply because the time to respond is short. The high volume of activity (e.g. frequent requests for purchase) on task and delivery order contracts like GSA Schedules, NASA SEWP, and a number of other IDIQ vehicles is nearly impossible to scrutinize and screen efficiently based on buying org, the nature of work, contract vehicle, etc.
2. Failing to get those task order notices to the right people. Organizations struggle to share new task order notices with internal teammates or subcontract teams who are external to their organization who may be participating in enough time to make the best bid/no decision.
3. Falling prey to the manual, time-consuming process to monitor the agency portals where task order notices are posted, pull them down, and make sure they are distributed to the right people.
4. Mixed results with team formation and missing visibility into the health and effectiveness of your task order pipeline and partner engagement.

GovWin’s Opportunity Manager is a Force Multiplier

There is typically an awful lot of human activity required to look for task order notices and make sure they are shared with the right stakeholders. Contractors say scattered, unreliable periodic checks of the various websites where task order based vehicles are posted is a frustrating endeavor and does not scale!

Opportunity Manager ensures some steps in that process are automated. Behind the scenes GovWin runs automated scripts to extract task order opportunities in near-real time on the contracts you have won a position on, along with any relevant documents. Scripts are run hourly to catch new/updates as they are posted and then fed into our secure platform where you can collect bid/no-bid responses.

This automation is critical and helps move along some of the decision-making process to answer questions such as:

• Do we have the workforce to support bidding on this work?
• Whom are going to partner with to optimize our bid?
• What’s our proposal strategy?
• Go or no go? Are we going after this work?

If your business is not meeting its desired growth numbers or if your relationship building with partners is not optimized for task order procurements, Opportunity Manager can serve as a force multiplier to help you build a winning, repeatable process. Customers have shared the efficiencies they gain include: Bidding more work with fewer resources; operating more efficiently by distributing opportunities in real time; enhanced and faster bid/no-bid decisions; establishing a competitive advantage; and the ability to identify weaknesses against requirements.

Ready to learn more? You can view this on-demand session recently hosted at Deltek’s recent Insight customer conference – How to Improve Your Success with Win Rates on Task Order Based Contracts – to better understand how Opportunity Manager works.

Or you can simply click this link to learn how Opportunity Manager can provide speed, efficiency and control to your task order response processes and give you a centralized platform to distribute task order notices and updates to the right people inside your organization and external partners.