Proposals tend to be rather universal; depending on the industry they can become rather complicated. Software services proposals for the most part are easy to relate to without much industry knowledge. Cost of labor per hour, estimated hours, software license costs, if applicable travel costs.
Proposals in general carry a plethora of information often time not analyzed more than a post modem discussion picking up the highlights. These are typically carried out over round table meetings and used to help streamline the process going forward. Not all times it’s clear why the bid wasn’t won, sometimes it’s known. Things such as pricing issues or overly general estimates might not be as obvious in isolation from other bids but in cases where the loss wasn’t clear why, more analysis is needed.
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Too often proposals involve multiple individuals working in isolation until the moment everyone comes together and the word doc or excel sheet is passed around for all to update their last minute changes. FlexForms provides a real-time collaboration experience showing updates as they are made and also showing user participation status in the form. This allows everyone to be looking at the whole picture and prevent last minute updates from not making it in, or worse, an entire person’s work from being left out.
In some proposals certain individuals participating only need access to a subset of many sections, sometimes read only is sufficient and other times removing visibility allows for greater user focus. FlexForms allows for users to share a form between users but also set section granular permissions for visibility and read only rights.
FlexForms allows for collections of controls to be configured in a repeating structure. This allows for concise form design and reduced use of form real estate where empty rows used to be. With required rows limit configuration options, form designers are able to put in safety checks to force the collection of data. Repeating grids offer business users tremendous flexibility in form design which was in the past left to only developers.
FlexForms is the only form designer which has repeating grid controls in the industry now.
Business users in FlexForms can easily configure calculations to be able to do basic math based on the values entered into form controls. In addition to math, users are able to do simple string manipulation and formatting. The repeating grid control allows business users to sum or average grid columns and those values are able to be used in other calculation fields across a form. This flushes out simple calculation mistakes from proposals and let’s staff focus on the task at hand vs. distracting detailed work.
FlexForms business data reporting capabilities allow a business to get a high level overview of otherwise obscured data sets. Word documents plus excel forms tend to be looked at in isolation; all fields in a FlexForm are available for reporting to allow greater visibility and ideally be able to take a holistic approach to improvement.
FlexForm is developed via a structured form upload (show image of completed form)
Team form configured and Sharing sections
Two people view form at one step (show participation status, show comments)
Once all users are finished form can be reviewed and printed in PDF for sharing with the potential customer.
Control calculations remove mundane tasks from word proposals where things are typically done by hand or dropped in from Excel. Allowing calculated values to be in fields gives them visibility from reports.
Business data reports allow for digging deeper into wins vs. losses to help streamline and identify process/proposal improvements.
