Proposals drafted from twelve years of precedent

The Challenge

The firm won work on the strength of its track record, but that track record lived in twelve years of proposal documents on a shared drive that only two people could navigate. Every bid started with someone trying to remember which previous project was closest, then copying and reworking sections by hand.

The result was predictable: strong proposals when a senior person had time, weaker ones when they didn’t, and a hard ceiling on how many bids the firm could pursue. Several tenders each year went unanswered simply because nobody could start them in time.

The Solution

We built a drafting workflow rather than a writing tool. It reads the tender documents, extracts requirements and evaluation criteria, and retrieves the firm’s most comparable past work — projects, references, CVs, methodology sections — before drafting anything.

The draft it produces is sectioned to the tender structure and written in house style, and every substantive claim carries a link to the document it came from. That traceability is what made the firm willing to use it: a partner reviewing a draft can check a reference in one click rather than trusting a paragraph.

Approval is enforced in the workflow, not by convention. Nothing can be exported for submission until a partner has signed off, which is why adoption did not come at the cost of the review culture the firm was built on.