Proposal writing is critical to winning new work but the process is often time-consuming, manual and disjointed. Many teams struggle with formatting inconsistencies, version control challenges and critical data spread across multiple spreadsheets.
For consultancies, maintaining high utilisation is crucial to profitability and in an increasingly competitive market, this has never been more important. That’s where Proteus comes in. Designed to streamline proposal workflows, Proteus reduces time spent on admin and maximises time spent delivering client value.
In this blog, we’ll explore how Proteus transforms the proposal process, helping consultancies win more business, faster.
Common Problems with Proposal Writing
Before we look at how Proteus solves them, it is worth highlighting the common pain points many consulting firms face during proposal development.
- Time-consuming: From tracking down the latest rate sheet to manually entering data and wrestling with formatting, building a proposal from scratch can be a major drain on time and resources.
- Inconsistencies across offices: Different teams and offices often have their own templates, styles, and processes leading to inconsistent branding and structure across the company’s proposals.
- Spreadsheet chaos: Rates, costs and resource data are scattered across multiple spreadsheets making it incredibly easy to make costly errors when copying data between them.
How Proteus Transforms Proposal Writing
- Create a Granular Project Plan with the WBS Builder
Proteus makes project planning simple and precise with its intuitive Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) builder. You can assign resources, define start and end dates, add key milestones, and rearrange work packages with a simple drag-and-drop interface. Creating a granular project plan enables you to track progress of specific tasks closely across the duration of your project.
A live summary panel on the left provides visibility into costs, resource allocation and margins so that you can confidently balance profitability with feasibility, without clicking between spreadsheets.
And because rate cards are centrally stored within Proteus, everyone uses the same up-to-date data. That means no more chasing down the latest version of a spreadsheet, improving the accuracy of your cost estimates and giving you a clear understanding of the as bid margin.
- Instantly Visualise Your Project Schedule
Proteus takes the hassle out of project scheduling. As soon as you build your Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), a fully formatted Gantt chart is instantly generated. Automatically creating a project schedule saves time and gives you a clear, visual timeline that maps out tasks and their durations. This visualisation can also be automatically added into your proposal template.
- Showcase Your Team and Track Record
Proteus also makes it easy to showcase your delivery team and experience. You can quickly build an organogram within Proteus to generate a clear, professional org chart that’s ready to drop into your proposal. This helps clients see how your team is structured and who’s responsible for what.
Additionally, you can insert relevant case studies from previous projects in Proteus with just a few clicks, highlighting past projects and demonstrating your capability all without leaving the platform.
- Accelerate proposal writing with the Word add-in and customisable templates
One of Proteus’ standout features is the Microsoft Word add-in, which allows you to put data from Proteus into your project proposal template. No more copying and pasting, no more worrying whether the numbers in your document are up to date and no more time is lost to formatting.
It saves hours of manual effort allowing project teams to spend more time focusing on value-added work. The Word add-in also ensures every proposal you produce is accurate, consistent and professional looking across your teams and offices.
These templates can be easily tailored to your organization’s branding, fonts, colors, and preferred structure making sure everything stays on-brand and professional.
For consultancies producing a high volume of proposals, this is a game-changer, bringing speed, accuracy and brand consistency into every document you deliver.
- From proposal to project in one click!
Once a proposal is won, Proteus lets you instantly convert it into an active project. All your data including work packages, budget, timeline, automatically transfers across. No duplication, no lost data and no scrambling to find the “right” numbers from scattered spreadsheets.
Everything stays in one place, so your delivery team starts with full visibility and alignment from day one ensuring successful project management.
Final Thoughts
By centralising, automating, and simplifying every step of the proposal development process, Proteus empowers project teams to deliver accurate proposals in a fraction of the time. If proposal writing is a pain point for your business, it might be time to let Proteus do the heavy lifting.
About Proteus
Proteus developed by a Scottish-based tech company, Xergy Group, is an end-to-end project management solution developed for the energy and engineering consulting industries.
Proteus is industry-proven and enables consultancies to meet project demands across the full lifecycle, from proposal development to project delivery. With robust sales and project delivery modules, Proteus helps its customers win more business, increase efficiencies, manage expenditures, and improve project controls.
Critical workflows, automation, and controls are integrated into Proteus. These include opportunity evaluation, proposal building, resource planning, budget tracking and forecasting, real-time multi-level restricted dashboards, and project performance analytics.
Third-party integrations and customised solutions allow Proteus’ users, which include C-suite, project leads, and engineers, to get the exact software solution needed for their business.
We offer a free onboarding consultation service to ensure your company account is set up to your company’s needs.
To learn more about how Proteus can help you improve your business efficiency and drive greater profitability, listen to The Work Simplified Podcast.
How to get Proteus
Proteus operates under a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. We offer Enterprise packages and flexible pricing solutions: contact our team to learn more requests@xergy.com
We designed Proteus to be simple, and that means you can get up and running on Proteus without an IT team or support from a programmer. You will want to spend a bit of time configuring the admin console so that you have everything set up to suit your company structure, but it is intuitive and you don’t need a PhD in IT.
However, we want you to get the best out of what is a brilliantly powerful tool, so don’t hesitate to ask for our support. We have a team of product experts who are ready to help you with the configuration process, so get in touch today by filling out the form below:
