Winvale Blog
The latest insights for government contracting success, GSA Schedule assistance, & IT Manufacturer support.
Kevin Lancaster leads Winvale’s corporate growth strategies in both the commercial and government markets. He develops and drives solutions to meet Winvale’s business goals while enabling an operating model to help staff identify and respond to emerging trends that affect both Winvale and the clients it serves. He is integrally involved in all aspects of managing the firm’s operations and workforce, leading efforts to improve productivity, profitability, and customer satisfaction.
Government Business Development | Government | Resources and Insight | Contracts
By:
Kevin Lancaster
December 5th, 2013
Government agencies are ditching their old habits and implementing new service desk software in hopes of more cost effective solutions to consolidate and optimize their help desk. The Department of Developmental Disabilities (DODD) based in Ohio, “The Buckeye State” was established to maintain applications for roughly 2,000 employees and provide customer support for over 10,000 customers. These customers ranged from county employees, developmentally disabled children and their parents, and service providers across the state.
GSA Schedule | Government Business Development | Government | Resources and Insight | Contracts
By:
Kevin Lancaster
November 18th, 2013
If your company has ventured into traditional government procurement, you are probably well aware of the downfalls of the procurement processes. For years, traditional public sector procurement processes have been criticized for being slow, inflexible and for limiting the purchases of goods and services from a select amount of vendors by government agencies. These issues with traditional government procurement processes still persist today. To combat these downfalls, many organizations have devoted resources to improve the processes and overcome hurdles that are detrimental to government innovation and efficiency. If you currently are involved or interested in selling to the government, you should be aware of some of the improvements that are occurring in the government procurement process. The State of California is now implementing a redesigned Request for Proposal (RFP) and IT planning process to prevent backtracking and speed up the deployment of new projects. Traditional government RFPs with long timelines, complex rules, and tight guidelines around liability has discouraged some of the most innovative IT companies from entering the government marketplace. To help amend these restrictions and find better ways to procure technology, North Carolina plans to test products before purchasing them in the state’s new innovation center. This initiative will ensure that products can actually fulfill the statement of work and meet budget requirements. BidSync, a provider of eProcurement solutions, has created a vendor management portal to consolidate the entire procurement process called FastFWD. From soliciting vendors, receiving bid notifications, managing contracts and requesting purchases, this tool provides government agencies with greater ability to manage and grow their networks of qualified vendors, while reducing the amount of time and manpower needed to manage these relationships. FastFWD utilizes new startups to launch new projects and solve old problems from the lack of early engagement with vendors that have led to restrictive or limited solutions. To learn more about the improvements being made to the procurement process, read “5 New Approaches to Government Procurement.”
Do you know what the real benefits of being on the GSA Schedule are? Learn the top 10 reasons (and advantages) why you should consider it.
Government Business Development | Government | Technology | Resources and Insight | Contracts
By:
Kevin Lancaster
November 14th, 2013
Businesses are always evolving, and through their evolution and expansion technology becomes obsolete and organizations find themselves needing an upgrade. As a customer base grows the need for technology grows greater. Most organizations spend thousands of dollars attaining and upgrading to the most current technology, but still have many problems implementing their new technology to meet all the demands of their customers. Organizations that invest in technology should also consider the effects of its implementation. Possessing technology does not necessarily prove it effective, and every organization needs an efficient system that can manage the services provided by its technology. That is where IT Service Management (ITSM) is born. ITSM is crucial to the functionality and expansion of organizations in several aspects: The number of requests for automating business processes is rapidly growing, ITSM can ensure speedy and accurate delivery to both internal end users and external customers. ITSM boosts productivity which results in lower operating costs and faster adaptability to customer requests for your business. ITSM can effectively capture and share knowledge for IT end users to quickly locate and fix reported problems. Upgrades and requests expand quickly, ITSM can assure a single, user friendly customer portal for reporting problems, software upgrades and requesting services. Tracking historical and real-time data through ITSM allows IT leaders to spot problems faster and using historical reports will increase productivity through analyzing past trends. IT Managers and business leaders can access their system from any location, allowing customers and employees to conduct transactions at any time, from anywhere. ITSM implementation is also designed for simplicity, meaning IT leaders aren’t required to have any special skills to create the customer forms, dashboards, and other various components. Implementing a successful ITSM strategy can help growing organizations process, maintain, and support a skyrocketing customer in-take and manage customers with a cost effective and simple solution. Read more about the benefits of ITSM and how it helped organizations such as PCMall and Evergreen in this white paper, “Leveraging Your IT Service Management.”
Government Business Development | Government | Technology | Resources and Insight
By:
Kevin Lancaster
November 4th, 2013
Technology is always changing, and with each change every successful organization needs to adjust to the upgrades and advancements. The downside of not upgrading can create incorrect data entry, poorly tracked documents, excess time consumption, and an overall increase in costs as a result. The solution to these problems - an Asset Management Solution (AMS).
Government Business Development | Government | Events | Resources and Insight | Contracts
By:
Kevin Lancaster
October 28th, 2013
The U.S. government shutdown this past October has been one of the most damaging elements in the growth of business for GSA Contractors. The shutdown has taken a toll of $24 billion out of the economy and also reduced a projected fourth-quarter GDP from 3 percent to 2.4 percent.
By:
Kevin Lancaster
October 24th, 2013
Two years ago, President Obama issued a challenge to all government agencies to expand their boundaries and think outside of the box in interest of America’s business community. In response, The U.S. Department of Commerce has developed a revolutionary platform that has fundamentally changed the field of business-to-government interaction. That platform is BusinessUSA.
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