Business Overview:
City Care is a leading
provider of construction, maintenance and management services across New Zealand's
infrastructure and amenity assets, employing over 1,350 staff across 16 operational
branches throughout the North and South Islands. Established in 1999, City Care has an annual turnover of
approximately $354 million. City Care is a Council Controlled Trading
Organisation (CCTO) operating under the Local Government Act.
Business Issue:
Each year City Care responds to over 150 tenders and
requests for information. To manage this
significant business development activity, City Care employs four tender
writers who gather and collate information from within the business to complete
a tender response.
The tender team identified that they spent a lot of time
formatting tender documents and there were inconsistencies in the brand and
layout of the final document.
Tenders documents can be very complex and large; often
documents are over 100 pages and may have more than ten individual contributors
to the document. “Responding to tenders can often be a high pressure task,
with short deadlines and considerable detail needed to be provided. Delays and time taken up in formatting and trying
to ensure consistency was frustrating”, says Margot Hall, City Care Business
Development Co-ordinator.
Solution:
City Care approached Ripped Orange to look at options. One option considered was to provide advanced
Microsoft Word training for staff who prepare tenders. After some consideration,
it was recognised that this would not address the issue of brand and document
consistency. It was identified that the
cost and time to train the users to a very advanced level would be considerable
and outweigh the benefits. Instead, Ripped Orange proposed that templates were
established and training provided to users on how to use these templates.
Gill Mason from Ripped Orange commented, “Even with advanced
users, the Smart Template approach works well as it ensures consistency and
speed of document creation”.
City Care commissioned Ripped Orange to undertake a scope of
the style and functionality required; this resulted in a base template that included
the City Care logo, fonts, icons, and graphic styles.
From this, Ripped Orange then developed specific Smart Templates
for tender covers, body copy and other components of a tender.
“Smart templates are designed so users can follow a quick
and easy process when inserting and managing the creation and layout of
documents. For example, call out boxes
can be inserted with a click of an icon:
The template also
handles the time-consuming issues of applying text font, colour and size,
headers and footers or switching from portrait to landscape with a click of an icon
for the user,” commented Mason.
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| Call out boxes can be made with a click of a button |
“The Smart Templates have allowed City Care to focus on the
content in the template rather than worrying about the graphics and layout with
the end result being a professional and consistent document”, commented Hall.
