Decision support for effective bidding in a competitive business environment

For enterprises with products that are tailor-made to order, both the efficiency and the effectiveness of bid preparation are essential prerequisites to sustain competitiveness. Preparing bids efficiently means reducing effort and resources to a minimum, while effectiveness implies high average success rates at good profit rates. Various approaches and systems exist that focus on increasing efficiency in bid preparation, but support allowing one to improve the effectiveness of the process is lacking. In the face of this situation, an advanced decision support system allowing a sales executive to determine the optimum sales price has been developed within the DECIDE (DECIsion support for optimal biDding in a competitive business Environment) project (ESPRIT Project No. 22298). To ensure a sound scientific and technological base as well as the optimal practical use of the system, three research institutes and universities, two industrial companies with complex engineered-to-order products and a software vendor are co-operating in the project. This paper describes the approach and presents intermediate results.