Case study: Web portal a net gain for MatchPoint

With a small team of four, adopting more efficient business practices was vital for MatchPoint Consulting to better service the needs of the state’s resources sector during industry’s boom time.

Company director Piers Dudman started MatchPoint Consulting in 2001 to provide specialist support and advice to companies for major bids, proposals and submissions.

The company’s clients represent a variety of industry sectors, from small regional businesses to the largest multinationals such as Leighton, DHL and IBM.

In five years, MatchPoint Consulting has worked on bids for contracts, grants and investment funding worth more than $12 billion, and is forecasting a similar amount of business heading its way in the next year alone.

The state’s resources boom presented an unexpected challenge for MatchPoint. With new business coming in fast, the pressure on the small team to deliver results and secure winning bids for their clients began to constrain the company’s ability to grow along with the industry.

“With competitive bids, when it gets close to the deadline, clients just want us to do anything to turn their bid into a winner,” Mr Dudman told WA Business News.

“We are quite used to working through the night; but we realised if we didn’t change the way we did things, the pressure from all this new work was going to kill us.”

Both the number of clients, and the size of the projects, coming on board increased.

“Large corporations such as Rio, Woodside and BHP Billiton started to ask us if we could help with their internal approvals process – in effect, to ‘sell’ their own projects to their own boards,” Mr Dudman said. “This presented a big challenge.”

The company went through a six-month learning curve, trying to develop new business processes to keep up with the increasing workload.

The entire MatchPoint team made a significant investment in the success of the business, according to Mr Dudman, working through the tasks the ‘old’ way, and developing improvements as they went.

 “We can’t afford to make mistakes, because we make mistakes with other people’s possessions, in effect. So it was a trial – getting it wrong – and putting it right,” Mr Dudman said.

The company implemented changes across the board, strengthening planning tools, and introducing systems to keep the project team focused around the  main issues.

It also established a web portal for sharing documents, instructions and status reports directly with clients, sharing the work with the client team.

“The web portal was a major advantage for us. It brought us to a stage where we were practically embedded in the clients’ organisation, without actually physically being there,” Mr Dudman said.

Over the course of 12 months, the company was able to respond to industry growth and reshape the business.

The changes provided MatchPoint with the flexibility to more efficiently deal with clients on projects in any part of the world.

“The extra reach [the web portal] gives us is wonderful. It’s not uncommon for us to be working happily with project teams located in Brazil, Africa or India,” Mr Dudman said.

The new systems are also scalable, with the ability to accommodate significant increases in workload, and position the company for further growth.

“We’ve developed an approach that works anywhere in the world,” Mr Dudman said.

 “Our next challenge is going to be helping these large corporations to adopt and build their own internal capability.”