Through digitisation of bid management, project management organisations can easily save 18 hours per project, which results in an average organisation to approximately €30,000 / year in savings.

As a project management organisation, you want to work as efficiently as possible, whilst providing the best-in-class service your clients expect from you. Utilising the latest property technology tools is the best way to achieve a boost in productivity while simultaneously showing your clients your expertise.

6 ways to improve productivity for project managers

When you look at a project timeline as a project manager, specifically at the tender phase, there are several stages where you can improve efficiency in every project:

• Creating and sending the bid pack to bidders;
• Finding past project to learn and copy best practices from;
• Centralizing all bid communication, including all Questions & Answers;
• Budgeting and cost tracking;
• Reporting to clients, including preparation of a good bid comparison;
• Internal administration of project data.

Creating and sending the bid pack

By working together in a cloud-based tool, teams can easily prepare and collect all required documents for the bid pack. Just select the final documents from the project page to add them to your bid pack, which will be sent to bidders. You can create a digital bid form for bidders to provide their pricing, making the comparison entirely automated at the end of the tender. Bid forms can be created from scratch, by template or by using any past project that is similar to yours.

Selecting your bidders is done through your preferred supplier list, which saves looking for the right email addresses in your inbox. After selecting the right bidders, you can easily amend the template invite email, which will be sent separately to all bidders. This way bidding stays confidential.

Finding past project to learn and copy best practices from

It is useful to learn from earlier executed projects to prevent making the same mistakes twice. You can learn from bid packs, bid forms and questions from bidders in the Q&A. This prevents a lot of similar questions that could have been prevented. It is also useful to invite the best bidders again for your next project.

Unfortunately, most companies are set up in a way that it is not easy to learn from earlier projects and especially not projects that have been executed by colleagues. This is because information is either poorly stored on a server, in private inboxes, or not at all.

With Proprli you can easily navigate and view every project in your company, even projects that have been executed years before. This improves knowledge sharing, which is important for new and young employees in your company.

Centralizing all bid communication, including all Questions & Answers

The problem with inviting bidders by email is that everyone asks questions by email as well, resulting in loads of duplicate questions from different bidders. It also takes up a lot of time answering all questions to the individual bidders. And to keep track of questions and answers is a hassle.

Through Proprli, you work with a centralized Q&A feature. All questions are collected centrally, and you can easily post answers back to all bidders with the click of a button. Answers are posted anonymously to keep bidders confidential to each other.

Budgeting and cost tracking

One of the main jobs during a project is to budget costs and keep track of spending, which takes up a significant amount of time. Especially because everyone does it in their own way in Excel files, which results in very different levels of quality.

Once you have tendered a project digitally, you can instruct the winning bidder digitally as well. This results in automated cost tracking, which saves a significant amount of time. All through one single platform.

Reporting to clients, including preparation of a good bid comparison

Preparing reports and finding the information from different sources is the least fun part of the job of a project manager. However, it is extremely important since it is the main communication channel to clients.

When working through a cloud-based platform, together with your client, there is no need to prepare reports anymore, since your client has access and transparency to the entire process already. In addition, your client is automatically updated with any progress when you work through the software, which saves you a lot of unnecessary requests for status updates.

Internal administration of project data

During a project, or at the end of the project, you need to save all important project data and communication on your server. This information is useful for any new projects, a track record for new pitches or when benchmarking new projects. However, internal administration is easy to forget as project managers will be starting their new project and have a high workload.

By working through a digital platform, the need for internal admin is entirely gone.

Time savings

All these time savings add up significantly. Good software also provides your organization with consistency, as everyone will work, report and admin the same way. Even handing over your project to a colleague, or providing access to your project, is done with the click on a button.

Example of cost savings for your organisation

When you add all cost savings per project, you end up with approximately 18 hours saved per project, as shown in the table below. Depending on how many projects you manage each year and on the all-in hourly rate per project manager, it reflects to a significant saving per year.

Let’s assume an all-in hourly rate per project manager of €53,19 per hour. Multiply this with 30 projects per year and you’re looking at a saving of approximately €29,361 per year.

Show your expertise to your clients

As an advisory business it is becoming more important than ever to show your clients your expertise. Showing your digital expertise and quality makes you stand out from other companies who are still lacking behind. Providing clients with transparency around the most important phase of the project, the tender phase, gives clients trust in your company. Showing your expertise was never as easy as now, with the right software to support you.