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Flowcase is a professional services automation tool specifically for bids and proposals. Flowcase has features that can help any professional services firm get full control over CVs, skills, experiences and improve how these are used to win more business.
Since Flowcase is a SaaS tool, companies of any size can get the same benefits and features that were previously only reserved for large, multinational companies with legacy, in-house tools to manage their CVs and Case Studies.
Flowcase has helped companies ranging from two employees to tens of thousands of employees improve their processes of updating, tailoring and formatting CVs, resumes, and case studies for bids and proposals.
The challenges vary from company to company, based on their size, culture, market, clients, project types, services delivered and how the bid teams work. However, we tend to see that different companies face different challenges based on their size and maturity, regardless of their location or industry. Therefore, we have created a list of typical challenges when it comes to CVs and Case Studies for a selection of hypothetical clients:
- A consultancy with 50 or more IT consultants
- A specialist engineering firm with 100 to 200 employees
- A law firm with 400 employees or more
- A specialist engineering firm with 1500 employees
- A regional or global engineering firm with 5000 employees
- A "Big 4" consultancy with tens of thousands of employees globally
Examples of when you need a dedicated tool
A consultancy with 50 developers or IT consultants
50 employees is the first step when a system is needed to have control, search-ability and to win larger bids
When a professional services firm has grown to 50 people, either over a few years, or a longer period, there is a lot of “legacy” data that is kept in various file shares or even inboxes. When a company reaches this size, having systems for CRM, HRM, Finance becomes an absolute requirement, and often a system for CV and Case Studies is needed too. It is also about the limit where the sales team tend to become a specialized focus area, and that each consultant might no longer need to be involved in the sales process as they would have to in a smaller company. Also, to win larger projects (both public and private) you need to collaborate with several smaller or a few larger partners to work on the bids.
If your consultancy has reached 50 employees, and you are still growing, then Flowcase can help you get good routines in place before the growth accelerates and you start losing control over the skills, experiences and projects in your company.
An specialist engineering firm with 100 to 200 employees
When a company reaches 100 consultants or engineers and continue to grow to 200 or more you have to have a system in place to ensure good quality data
When a company passes 100 employees, submitting bids and performing the day to day administration of individual CVs, resumes, and case studies in word or file shares become a full time job. At this company size, you need a team of people to communicate internally and allocate resources to perform the task of keeping skills and projects updated. It is also at this size some companies get a specialized sales or bid team who work solely with bids and tenders. This team needs dedicated tools to do their job efficiently. You also need tools to search and find relevant skills, experiences and projects within your organization. You simply cannot keep track of this much data manually anymore.
A law firm with 400 or more employees
When your law firm grows to 400 employees it is time for a rebranding, and more you have to master complex and larger bidding processes
Since the company has grown from a small to a medium size, it is time for new fonts, colors and a new brand to reflect this change in size, history and maturity. In this case it is often the bid or HR team that have to manually copy/paste or reformat the CVs and resumes in the new format or design. This could easily be 3-4 weeks of boring, tedious job for one or two persons. With Flowcase you can easily change the template, and iterate to find the very best fonts, colors and positioning. The same data can then be exported in the new format with the click of a button. The same goes for PPT and legal ranking formats which Flowcase supports out of the box.
At this size, your company can take on larger, multi-year contracts or frame agreements with both public and private companies which often have a more rigorous bidding process. A competitive RFQ or tender with CVs and Case studies need to be submitted almost every week. Therefore, you need a system to win these tenders. You need to have good quality CVs and Case Studies in case someone requires a specific skill or experience.
A global engineering firm with 1,500 or more engineers in multiple disciplines
Having over 1,500 employees requires dedicated in-house resources to managing skills, CVs, resumes, and case Sstudies
When a company surpasses the 1,500 employee mark, it becomes very difficult to keep track of all the skills and competencies for all employees in a file share or excel sheet. You need to have a tool that makes it easy for users to update skills and find relevant expertise in the company. If you would send out a new word based CV or Case Study template to employees, the files you would get back would be very varying, and getting consistency and high quality is very difficult. Also, companies this size typically have dedicated people responsible for the CVs, resumes, and case studies, either in administration/management, HR or the sales/bid team.
At this size, there will likely be a large number of departments and offices who have historically had different ways of working with bids and proposals. The company has been restructured at least once. You may wish for each department to have individual autonomy, but still have the possibility of being professional and submitting bids across departments.
Security, backups, redundancy and availability is also key for a company this size. You might even have developed an in-house tool at some point, how well is this system working now after a few years of negligence? Flowcase has rolled out to several companies this size and we can help you get full control over your CVs, resumes, and case studies.
A big 4 consultancy with tens of thousands of employees globally
Accelerating from 5,000 employees and beyond
For a company with more than 5,000 employees it gets hard to get an overview of all employees in even a part of the organization, as a department itself will share the same challenges as a firm with the same size. When a company reaches this size, it has often been through mergers and acquisitions, and having a uniform and professional CV or resume database is either non-existent or a huge challenge waiting for someone to solve it. Also, a company this size might have a custom built intranet, or tool that might be used as an internal skill repository. When this system reaches a certain number of users it will not have the features, either security or usability to support the number of users in the company. It is time to merge the data into a purpose built, scalable and user friendly cloud-based software such as Flowcase. Also, merging from a legacy database has lots of benefits, since the data can be migrated by our Customer Success Team with a high degree of precision.
A global company with tens or hundreds of thousands of employees
At this size, the company is truly global and you need to have full control over your IT systems, security, availability and integrations with other tools. The internal IT team is faced with integrating systems across countries, offices, time zones, operating systems, budgets and languages. A company this size both has departmental or regional bid teams as well as a team working on large bids globally.
Regardless of size, all professional services firms need to keep track of CVs, resumes, and win bids. Flowcase is a scalable SaaS tool that can be used by companies of all sizes. We help our clients grow through these stages, and support them with features and tools to manage and accelerate the growth. As a smaller company, you get the benefits of all the features that you would not have had developing your own tool, and the same enterprise grade security, availability and features that normally only large companies have.
If you are interested in learning more, reach out and book a personalized demo with our awesome team.
