The Bid Factor: A Digital Roadmap From First Steps to Delivery
When it comes to infrastructure projects, big ambitions often meet bigger realities.
Across sectors, cycles are turning: AMP7 to AMP8 in water, a new control period in rail, and the next road investment strategy in highways. Many organisations are either bidding competitively or justifying multi-year funding envelopes. In both cases, the team that secures the work is not the team that delivers it, and margins are often slim over long contract horizons. Getting the transition right is crucial.
Too often, the teams responsible for winning bids operate in an ivory tower - removed from those who must deliver the work. For bid teams, good looks like securing the contract, not for ensuring it can be delivered. And when delivery teams inherit assumptions that don’t reflect operational reality, the gap between promise and performance widens fast.
It’s in this transition, from bid to mobilisation, where the solution lies. And data is the key.
The Trouble with Winning Bids
Bid teams are built to win, it’s what they do. But in the drive to stay competitive, they sometimes push beyond what existing performance can support, without first reflecting on how previous contracts have performed.
The same challenge applies to organisations securing multi-year funding rather than contracts. For example, a water company justifying its investment plan to a regulator is still making commitments that will shape performance for years to come. Getting those assumptions right, and grounded in real operational data, is critical.
When bid teams work in isolation, without input from delivery or access to reliable data, and with AI tools increasingly used to assist proposal development, gaps in information can amplify risk.
We recently worked with an engineering client who wanted to understand why they were not making the required margin across a portfolio of long-term, reactive maintenance contracts. Each regional contract had been priced on an assumed level of daily output, but because historic performance data was fragmented and inconsistent, those assumptions were built on instinct and precedent rather than insight.
Although data was meticulously captured at the worksite via tablets and vehicle tracking technology, inconsistent labelling, contractual nuance, and siloed systems meant it couldn’t be compared or used effectively. The result was a significant gap between the output promised in bids and what was actually being achieved in delivery.
This raises difficult questions.
If you bid at lower levels of output, do you become uncompetitive?
If you bid at higher, more ambitious levels, how do you bridge the performance gap?
All too often, work is won at rates current performance can’t sustain. Without a clear plan to address that gap, teams become fragmented, the bid baseline collapses, and years of firefighting, pressure, and rate renegotiation follow.
Creating a Golden Digital Thread
This disconnect between bid and delivery is throwing it over the fence - one team passing a project to another without the information needed to succeed.
The critical part of the fix lies in creating a golden digital thread: a single, trusted source of truth that connects every stage of the process and every team involved.
But building that thread isn’t simple. In the example above, data was captured across multiple systems and regions, each with its own formats, labels, and definitions. We supported the client by extracting more than a million lines of data from asset management and vehicle tracking systems, cleansing and aligning them with AI-enabled normalisation algorithms.
This process transformed fragmented and uncleansed data into a unified dataset that could be interrogated at scale.
For the first time, the business could rigorously test the assumptions made in its bids - across a large enough sample and time period to account for natural performance variance - and pinpoint exactly where mobilisation needed to improve.
Digital That Drives Continuous Improvement
Consistent, trusted data doesn’t just clarify the past; it drives continuous improvement for the future. It shows where performance is falling short, where processes need to evolve, and how teams can work together to improve.
When bid, mobilisation, and delivery teams share this visibility, collaboration becomes purposeful. Weak points become improvement opportunities. Shared goals turn into practical, day-to-day behaviours that close the gap between what was promised and what’s being delivered.
If you’re in the process of bidding for new work, take a step back and ask:
How accurate and complete is our data?
How easily can different teams access and interpret it?
To what degree are we cleansing and unifying data to inform our bid, and to prepare for delivery?
Does our data show what we need to improve to deliver at the level we've bid at
The answers will reveal not just how precise your bid is, but how ready your organisation is to deliver it.
Data as a Strategic Asset
Data isn’t just a record of what’s been done; it’s a strategic asset that guides what comes next.
Handled well, it turns gut instinct into measurable confidence and connects ambition to achievable outcomes.
At Spitfire, we help organisations turn their digital data into the insights that drive performance improvement.
If bridging the gap between a winning bid and successful delivery is your next challenge, let’s make data your competitive edge.