Sterling and Wilson wants to bid more without hiring in proportion

Sterling and Wilson is a specialised EPC that designs and builds data centres. Its customers are hyperscalers, colocation providers, enterprises and government bodies, which are four different procurement cultures arriving in the same pipeline.

Ranjit Gajare is Chief Growth Officer. Sales, business development, tendering and pricing all sit under him, along with go to market for India and the international markets. He is not describing a problem happening two floors down. The tendering function is his.

Nothing gets won without a bid

"Each and every job we bag or hope to bag goes through a tendering process."

There is a pre qualification. Then a technical round. Then a commercial round. A government tender and a private one differ in shape, but neither one lets you skip the process. Every rupee of revenue at Sterling and Wilson passes through it.

That makes bidding capacity and growth the same variable. Mr. Gajare says the company is seeing very good traction from the market for data centres and expects to grow at a fast pace over the coming years. So the ceiling is not the number of opportunities available. It is the number the tendering function can work through properly.

What the effort is actually made of

Reading, analysing and evaluating tender documents. That is the phrase he uses, and he calls it manual effort, which is the honest word for it.

Behind that sits a second cost that gets talked about less. Risk points, contradictions in the documents, and the bid queries that go back to the client. Each of those is a workflow, and each workflow pulls in a group of people across the organisation. So the price of a bid is not one person's week. It is a cross functional loop, run again on the next bid, and the one after that.

What Mr. Gajare took from the demo, in the order he raised it.

Document review first

He liked that the platform could look at, review and analyse a stack of documents in a short time, and expects it to compress the front end of the tender cycle where the reading happens.

Risk assessment

This is the feature he named first when asked what interested him most:

"I really like the risk assessment part where it maps every risk point on the probability versus the impact."

Summaries

The summaries follow the same logic. Risk, contradictions and bid queries come back as a crisp summary rather than something a group of people assembles by hand over several days.

Auto generated tender PPT

The last one he has not used yet, and says so: the auto generated PPT that carries the synopsis of the whole tender. He flagged it as the other part he wants to get to. It is on his list, not in his workflow.

The growth maths

His own framing of why any of this matters:

"If we have to grow faster, we have to bid more and more efficiently and keep our costs in control in terms of how many resources we have onboarded."

The default lever for bidding more is hiring more people to read. That lever works, and it puts your cost base on the same slope as your bid volume. What he is testing is whether the number of bids one team can carry moves instead, which would take growth off the hiring line.

Where this stands

Early. Mr. Gajare has been clear that they have just got started, and nothing above is a measured result yet. There are no hours saved to report and no before and after on bid volume.

What exists is a demo, an assessment from the person who runs the function, and his answer when asked whether ContraVault could be a growth factor for companies that want to bid faster and more confidently. He said yes, and then said it was his own objective anyway.

If every job you win has to clear pre qualification, a technical round and a commercial round, we will run one of your live tender packages through ContraVault and show you what comes back.