You can set up some initial groups based on the departments or functional groups that review or contribute regularly to your bids such as corporate, management, legal, finance, HR.
But you can also add any regular external team members such as partners or consultants and you can see here that I’ve added “external” in brackets so that it’s very clear to anyone using our Bidhive that members of an external company will be given access from time to time.
If you’re a multinational it might be a good idea to set up naming conventions for your Groups and Admins can manage this before invitations are sent out.
For example, depending on how your company is set up you might write “Engineering (London)” and “Engineering (Sydney)”; or Bid Team (New York) and Bid Team (Melbourne) in a person’s profile. This lets your teams also see the location of other members.
The great thing about having Groups is that you can set them up and then invite them to your bids on an “as needs” basis and you can add, remove or swap people in and out of that group very quickly.
This is particularly helpful for when you have external collaborators who aren’t part of a permanent bid team.
Something to be aware of with adding and removing people from Bidhive permissions is that there’s an audit trail of activity and for this reason users can be deactivated but they can’t be removed as this affects reporting metrics for historical activity and outcomes.
The same also applies to bids registered in the platform.
Another way you can use Groups is on a bid by bid basis to quickly give people time-based or bid-specific access to Bidhive. For example if you are running a consortium bid you might want to create a team that has full access to the platform, but no visibility of the broader company data, or you may just want to give access to a section of a bid, and nothing else.
In this instance you could simply name the Group by the bid name, for example PULSE consortium and set up an alliance-specific bid room and invite a number of users outside of your company to Bidhive where they can collaborate and have shared access to bid documentation on a need-to-know.