How Capture2Proposal Captures Big Data
The quality of your competitive intelligence can send you home a winner or a loser. The landscape of competitive intelligence has changed significantly over the past decade. Everyone is talking about Big Data because it’s changing how we do business. If you want effective, high quality, competitive intelligence, then Big Data must be part of the equation.
Team Capture2 has mastered the art of using Big Data to produce the most effective, competitive intelligence available. We have processed nearly 12 million procurement related documents so that our Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools can search for keywords and phrases to provide the most accurate information associated with each opportunity. Without an intelligent search engine, you would need to search through opportunity titles and descriptions, download them, and evaluate them to see how well the work fits your core capabilities. Some opportunities, where the scope is buried within the documents, may be missed. By taming Big Data, Team Capture2 makes it much easier to identify meaningful and competitive intelligence.
Big Data without smart design is not going to make your job easier, Take, for example, a company that specializes in Supply Chain Management for helicopters. Consider the results of the following searches:
- Entering the two terms “supply chain” and “helicopters” returns over 40,000 separate opportunities. A result set like this is too big to be useful.
- Now, add a Boolean (AND, OR, or NOT condition). Search “supply chain” AND “helicopter”: With a smart search engine like Capture2Proposal, this refines your competitive intelligence to around 300 opportunities.
The competitive intelligence landscape began with nearly 12 million documents. But by applying NLP, C2P’s business intelligence search engine identified 300 opportunities that contain both search terms. These terms are either in the opportunity title, synopsis or buried in any of the associated documents. Scrolling through the search results, a user can quickly identify potential opportunities.
In this case, there is a predominance of opportunities that belong to the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA). This is not surprising since the search criteria included supply chain and anyone in logistics probably works with DLA regularly. There are, however, other agencies identified in the search. If the user is a BD Manager whose company has been focused on supply chain management of helicopter parts for DLA, this competitive intelligence reveals a whole new hunting ground of potential opportunities with additional customers. This is great competitive intelligence!
Know where to Hunt- Competitive Intelligence
A BD Manager will likely start putting together capability briefs for these new potential customers: Army, Navy, Air Force, and DHS. In the search results, C2P highlights where the keywords and phrases are located without downloading, opening and searching all the files in each opportunity individually. But to do a good competitive analysis, additional refinement is needed. Not all of those 300 opportunities are going to fit your needs right now. The BD Manager can narrow the search further using C2P’s filter sidebar within the search results to identify:
- Opportunities in pre-solicitation status,
- Those that are expiring in 18 months to a year out,
- Any Set-Aside status that applies to your company (e.g. Small Business, 8(a), Service Disabled, etc.)
Like a skilled hunter, the BD Manager identifies the targets and easily adds them to their C2P BD pipeline. Then they plan, watch for movement, and when it’s time, they take their best shot with a well-prepared proposal. Capture2’s NLP capabilities help every step of the way, by not only processing the Big Data used to power the search, but also by providing easy access to the incumbent opportunity for follow-on work, and straight-forward analytics showing the incumbent awardees, the tasks orders, and modifications that were completed under the incumbent contract.
Managing the Hunt with Competitive Intelligence
If business development is analogous to hunting, think of Big Data as the large forest. Capture2Proposal helps show you the path through the woods to where the big game roams so that you can hunt more efficiently. With the number of Government RFPs that are released each year, it’s a wise business investment to have a tool that extracts for you only the relevant information from the vast universe of Big Data. Care to check out an example of C2P’s data for yourself? Contact us here, mention the Big Data blog, and we’ll show you the way to the big game. Happy Hunting!
