Page 113 - Writing Winning Business Proposals

104 Writing Winning Business Proposals

Let me give you a good example of what I mean. I was once a vice president
at RST, one of the world’s largest industrial companies. We were introducing a
new organizational concept in all our domestic and foreign factories, an effort
that would be extraordinarily complex, involve massive change in the organi-
zation, and require a high level of rapport between us and the consultants. We
were looking for outside support to work together with us in an ill-defined situ-
ation to detect problems, resolve issues, and implement solutions that neither of
us could anticipate. The risk was potentially high, and the rewards potentially
higher. Nobody had tried this sort of thing before, and, obviously, no consultant
had ever tried to help someone do it.
None of this, of course, was lost on the consultant who wrote the winning pro-
posal. Here’s the first major section of his proposal letter. Study it carefully, and
you’ll see what I mean.

Our Understanding of Your Situation
During the past few weeks, we appreciated being included in the evolution of
your thinking on this difficult project and our potential involvement to help
implement your XYZ Cost Concept. This letter concisely describes how we can
help you successfully accelerate the worldwide integration.

Over the years, RST has managed its manufacturing on a plant-by-plant
basis. As a result, similar and related products were produced using differ-
ent methods and technology in different locations. For this reason, costs and
quality often varied. To reduce variability and costs, you are in the process
of establishing integration centers to be responsible for products or related
component groups wherever they are manufactured. In other words, each
center will be responsible for developing products at the lowest cost and at
high quality in order to optimize results.

Each center will be responsible for total worldwide volume for its selected
products and for developing a common manufacturing process to improve
technology utilization and reduce overhead. In this way, each center will bal-
ance design, manufacturing, use of automation, and scheduling. Each will
become involved early in the product design effort to set design ground rules
to ensure optimum production. Furthermore, each will consolidate worldwide
throughput, yields, defect control, costs, inventory, turnaround time, etc., for
its product or component responsibility.

Implementation of this concept will be extremely complex. This complex-
ity was emphasized when we reviewed the matrix of centers and locations.
Indeed, changes in coordination, measurement and evaluation systems,