How Edrak cut proposal turnaround from 8 working days to 2 at a professional services firm

The company

The firm provides strategy, operations and transaction advisory to corporate and government clients, with around 450 consultants across three offices.

New work arrives as requests for proposal: a scope to respond to, a deadline, and an expectation that the firm will show exactly why it is qualified.

The firm responds to roughly 30 proposal requests a month. Winning them is the growth engine. Producing them was a tax on the most senior people in the building.

Every proposal restarted from zero

A credible proposal needed material scattered across the firm:

• Relevant past engagements, and the results they delivered
• Team CVs matched to the scope, current and correctly formatted
• Methodologies the firm had actually used on similar work
• Pricing references from comparable engagements
• The compliance and legal boilerplate each client type required

None of it lived in one place. It sat in old proposals, final reports, partners’ laptops and the memory of whoever had staffed the last similar job.

So each proposal was rebuilt by hand. Senior consultants searched shared drives for precedents, rewrote credentials from memory, and chased colleagues for CVs. Under deadline, teams reused whatever they could find, and the firm’s best work often never made it into the document.

Starting with proposals

The firm deployed Atlas around one process: receiving a request, assembling the response, and preparing it for partner review.

Foundry indexed the firm’s own record:

• Every delivered engagement: scope, approach, team and outcome
• Past proposals, with what won and what did not
• Consultant CVs and staffing records
• Methodology documents and delivery templates
• Rate cards and pricing from comparable work

Access followed the firm’s own confidentiality walls: client-restricted material stayed restricted, and engagements under NDA never surfaced outside their teams.

The firm’s delivered work became a searchable asset instead of an archive.

From request to reviewed draft

When a request arrived, Atlas parsed the scope, evaluation criteria and deadline, then assembled the response from the firm’s record.

The proposal team opened a draft that already contained:

• The three most relevant past engagements, with their measured outcomes
• Credentials written from delivered work, each traceable to its engagement
• Proposed team CVs matched to the scope and formatted to the template
• A methodology section drawn from what the firm used on similar jobs
• Pricing references and the required legal annexes

Consultants edited substance: the win themes, the approach for this client, the commercial call. Atlas kept every claim linked to its source engagement so the partner could verify anything in one step.

Partners kept the pen

A proposal is a commercial commitment and a statement of the firm’s credibility. The controls stayed explicit:

• The engagement partner reviewed and approved every proposal before submission
• Pricing required the commercial lead’s sign-off
• Credentials could only cite engagements the firm actually delivered
• Client-confidential material never crossed its wall, enforced at retrieval

The audit trail recorded which sources each section drew on and who approved each version.

The assembly moved to Atlas. The judgment, the pricing and the signature stayed with the partners.

Measured across two quarters

The firm compared two quarters on Atlas against the preceding two, same request volume, same proposal categories, using its CRM and timesheet data.

• Median turnaround fell from 8 working days to 2, measured from request receipt to submission
• Senior time per proposal fell from 41 hours to 12, measured from coded timesheets
• 100% of credentials traced to delivered engagements, replacing claims rewritten from memory
• No submission deadline was missed in the measured period, against four misses in the prior two quarters
• The firm responded to 22% more requests with the same proposal team

Win-rate movement is tracked but attributed cautiously; the firm credits the recovered senior time as the primary gain.

A different week for senior people

Partners stopped spending evenings hunting for precedents and formatting CVs. Their proposal time concentrated on positioning, pricing and the client conversation.

Junior consultants stopped learning the firm’s history by accident. The relevant precedent surfaced with the work, whoever was staffed.

The firm’s memory compounds

Every submitted proposal and every engagement outcome flows back into Foundry, linked to its client type, sector and result.

When a similar request arrives, the winning approach surfaces with it. When a credential is used, it carries the latest outcome, never the version frozen in an old document.

The firm’s institutional memory stopped depending on tenure.

Extending the operating model

With proposals running, the firm began applying Atlas to adjacent workflows:

• Engagement setup: staffing, conflict checks and kickoff packs
• Deliverable quality review against the contracted scope
• Client account summaries ahead of partner meetings
• Alumni and reference tracking for credentials

Each follows the same model: Atlas assembles from the firm’s record; consultants judge, edit and sign.

The outcome

The firm needed its senior hours going into clients rather than into document assembly, without letting proposal quality drift.

Atlas and Foundry cut turnaround from eight days to two, cut senior time per proposal by 70%, and put a delivered engagement behind every claim.

The firm now sells with its whole record, and its partners’ time goes where the clients are.