INF336 Wk4 DQ1
At a previous position, we were bidding on a project for public safety dispatch recording for 24 sites, with full redundancy and onsite archiving and redundant cloud storage of all recordings for 24 months. While this is a big sale, with hardware and software running into several millions of dollars, the salespeople and company administration did not recognize the big ticket item at first; namely, the installation services and ongoing support services for five years, with options for years six and seven as well, at increasing revenue for each year. The services actually dwarfed the tangible deliverables, well more than doubling the hardware and software components.
The selection process for the project bid took the service selection quite seriously. Each bidder was asked to provide in-depth financial records, information about the company’s and the service organization's structure, and several references from large customers, preferably of similar size and geographical organization. Also, each
bid had to include an installation schedule to complete all 24 sites within eight months, and a complete breakdown of the support plan including SLA’s for each type of service incident. The organization checked all references thoroughly.
As a well-established but small business, our company was unable to compete with the larger manufacturers and ultimately lost the bid. However, the process forced the company to examine their entire support model and allowed them to find the areas where improvement was needed. Also, it is imperative to keep the relationships with the vendors in good standing, and that cooperation feeds more mouths than competition.
