Decision support software for optimal business bidding
The Commission of the European Communities has given financial support to an innovative Information Technologies project. The Esprit Project DECIDE, decision support for optimal bidding in a competitive business environment, has developed a computerised system that provides decision support in order to improve the effectiveness of bidding. The project integrates, using innovative methods, the commercial and organisational aspects of the procedure initiated from a call for proposals from a client and terminated with a successful bid. This decision support software tool can be directly used for a number of enterprises that offer products tailor made to satisfy customer needs like aircraft manufacturing, space industry, transportation system industry and the construction industry. Enterprises like the above struggle to remain competitive in a constantly changing and ever growing market. In order for them to survive and expand, they have to obtain profitable contracts. The procedure in such cases is that after the call for proposals made by the client these enterprises have to determine the bid price. To optimise the bid price and secure as much as possible a profitable contract is the aim of the DECISION project. To achieve this aim, the first step must be to quantify, store and be able to manipulate all available information and existing knowledge on the basis of which the bid price will be determined. This kind of information, about competitors, about customer requirements or one's own production costs for example, is quite dispersed and imprecise. Such information is stored at two of the four elements of the DECIDE toolkit; the Enterprise Products and Processes Model Repository (EPPMR) that contains info related to the enterprise and at the Value Analysis Support System (VASS) that quantifies the preferences of the client. Estimation of costs accompanied by indications on the accuracy of the cost estimate is done by the Product Cost Modelling Support System (PCMSS) toolkit. The fourth element of the DECIDE toolkit, the Product Pricing Support System, calculates the maximum price of the bid subject to predefined possibilities of success. Finally, the Decision Dashboard collects the results from these four elements, on maximum price, cost, possibility of success and future projected profits if the bid is successful and presents them to the enterprise's decision maker for the ultimate and final decision on the company's bid price. The DECIDE results are very promising and have already been published in various scientific periodicals around the world. From its first exploitation period it has been deduced that end users of the toolkit will decrease the costs for a bid by 20% and will increase the bid winning rate by about 10%.
