Client story: Capita
Business process outsourcing and professional services
Capita has 52,000 employees and operates in the UK, Europe, India, and South Africa.
From March 2021
Capita is a consulting, transformation and digital services business. It’s the largest business process outsourcing and professional services company in the UK, with clients in central government, local government, and the private sector.
- Opportunity consulting: Bid evaluation and scoring
- Opportunity consulting: Pre-mortems and bid strategies
- Opportunity consulting: Tactical support
- Business change: Maturity assessment
- Enhanced skills: Bid training
Getting to know each other
Capita first met the BidCraft team through our successful work on IQVIA’s Covid-19 Infection Survey tender. You can read more about this in our IQVIA client story. As a member of the IQVIA consortium, Capita had a front row seat to the action and saw us deliver first hand.
Capita’s Deal Lead was so impressed with us (we’re not bragging, it’s just true) he recommended us to their Head of Bids who asked us to assess a recently unsuccessful proposal. Capita thought the proposal was strong, so they wanted to know why it hadn’t won. Our team had a root around to find out, looking at all aspects including structure, scoring, win themes and evidence. Our assessment was presented in a detailed report with actionable recommendations to carry forward into future bids. But we didn’t just say what was wrong (that would be rude) we also highlighted the good bits, so they knew where they were already on the right track.
Measurable impact, from day one
Our recommendations were put into place for Capita’s next bid, which was to the same government client. This time they won the contract, and Capita reported back to us that our suggestions were responsible for the change in fortunes.
By now, Capita had witnessed our impact both at IQVIA and for themselves. And when we prove our impact, we often see a chain reaction unfold. This case was no exception.
Capita’s Head of Bids referred us on to help them with a joint Ministry of Defence/Crown Commercial Service framework tender, worth up to £1.2bn. This time we gave a comprehensive cold-eye review from an evaluator’s perspective to see how well the bid was likely to score. We made detailed recommendations on how to make improvements. With 250 pages of content to review across five separate Lots with 335 different evaluation criteria, there was a lot to get through. While we recovered in a dark room, word of our forensic approach and constructive feedback spread, causing another ripple of referrals within the company.
An ongoing partnership
We were introduced to the Deal Leads on two further projects. We carried out a pre-mortem workshop that identified a whole whiteboard’s worth of potential threats to them winning. That’s the beauty of pre-mortems: once you know what the threats are, you can deal with them. And that’s exactly what the team did. We then reviewed the bid and scored it as only a critical friend would, highlighting where improvements could be made.
Our business is largely gained through word-of-mouth referrals. As you can see from our work with Capita, when people like what we do – and how we do it – they tend to keep us around. We’ve got other Capita opportunities in the pipeline as our reputation and impact begins to grow.