Allscope Services uses ContraVault AI to cut 87% of the time it takes to bid a request for proposal
"It catches things that I may not catch. It reads everything like it should and just pulls out what we need to know."
- 87%
- Of bidding time saved on every RFP
- Up to $3,600
- In attorney fees avoided per bid
About Allscope Services
Allscope Services is a water and wastewater infrastructure and support services company based in Alvin, Texas, serving public and commercial clients. Most of its work arrives as a request for proposal (RFP), the document package a client sends out to invite bids.
Andrea Gentry is CEO and President. She runs two companies and handles bids, legal matters and client relationships herself, so the bidding problem she describes is one she reads through page by page.
Opportunity
The smallest RFP Andrea has seen ran 32 pages and the largest about a thousand, before drawings. A typical review took her three to six hours, and the RFPs in the hundreds of pages took a few days.
The time was only part of the cost. Anything questionable went to an attorney at $300 to $600 an hour, and sending a whole RFP out for legal review added up fast.
The bigger risk was the clause nobody caught. Her example is a cybersecurity requirement buried in the terms, where falling short after award can put the company in breach and headed for arbitration. Liquidated damages, the fixed daily penalty a contractor pays when a job runs past its completion date, are the other one, and she puts them at a couple of hundred to thousands of dollars per day.
"If it's overbid you got that cushion. We underbid, you don't have that cushion."
Every RFP now goes into ContraVault AI first, before anyone at Allscope starts reading.
Full document read
ContraVault AI reads the entire RFP, from the 32-page ones to the thousand-page ones, and pulls out what each person needs to know.
One view per reader
Andrea reads the terms and conditions, her technical advisor goes in for the technical sections, and her accountant goes in for the commercial ones. Nobody reads the whole package to find their part.
Flagged clauses
Cybersecurity requirements, liquidated damages and other risk terms are surfaced before the bid goes in, so the team prices with the cushion they need.
One question for the attorney
If something still needs a legal opinion, the attorney gets that one clause instead of the whole RFP.
Takeoff on the same platform
Reading the RFP is the first half of a bid, and pricing it is the second. ContraVault AI now handles the takeoff as well, the work of going through the drawings to count and measure everything that has to be bought and installed. For a contractor like Allscope that builds and services water and wastewater infrastructure, it can count every valve, pump and fitting and measure every pipe run, saving 90% of estimation time.
Andrea estimates that ContraVault AI now saves 87% of the time she used to spend bidding an RFP.
The hours she got back go into networking and winning the next job.
Bidding time:
87% saved on every RFP
Review time:
three to six hours per RFP, now back to Andrea
Legal review:
attorney sees one flagged clause instead of the whole document, at $300 to $600 an hour
Risk:
clauses that could put the company in breach are caught before the bid goes in
In Andrea's words:
"It's not taking away the job. It's just helping you work smarter to give you some time back. It's worth the investment."
Read Less, Price More
If your team is reading hundred-page RFPs before every bid, ContraVault AI was built for your workflow.