Understanding the Proposal Preparation Process

PeopleSoft Proposal Management enables you to develop and administer project proposals to expedite the closure of business opportunities and to reuse proposal versions for future engagements.

Using PeopleSoft Proposal Management:

A proposal can have multiple versions.
A version can have multiple projects.
A project can have multiple activities.
Each project must have at least one activity.
An Activity can have multiple resources.

To prepare and generate proposal information using PeopleSoft Proposal Management:

Enter general proposal information.
Proposal preparation begins on the Maintain Proposal page, where you enter or select a start and end date, customer, proposal planner, proposal contact, proposal description, and version description. This information does not usually change throughout the process of creating various proposal versions.
Configure the system to calculate labor.
You can use the business calendar that you identified at the project level; however, users decide how to estimate their labor at the proposal level. You can estimate labor by hour, start and end dates, or weeks. (The number of hours in a week is driven by the business holiday calendar.)

If you estimate labor by hours, the total will be Hourly Rate × Hours.

If you estimate labor by start date and end date, the system uses the business calendar to determine the working hours between the dates.

If you estimate labor by weeks, the total will be Hours Per Week × Number of Weeks × Hourly Rate.

On the Time Configuration page, you can configure PeopleSoft Proposal Management to calculate time based on your specific business practices. For example, if you configure PeopleSoft Proposal Management to calculate 10-hour days and you have an hourly rate of 20.00 USD, then the system multiplies the hourly rate by 10 for each estimated day of work. You can also display time information in weeks or use the start and end dates that you entered on the proposal to calculate time estimates.
Enter security and billing information.
Provided that you have enabled security when you set up your business units, you can limit the number of people who are able to view your proposal by selecting specific departments and employees on the Setup Options page. You can also use this page to tell the system what types of rows to create (bill, cost, both, or none) when you generate contract and budget information from the proposal.
Enter labor estimates.

You can enter a resource (labor, asset, material, other (subcontract)) estimate for each project and activity that is associated with the proposal. For each project role that is associated with an activity, you can enter the number of people on the project who will be assigned to the role and the estimated number of hours. The system displays the unit cost and bill rates for each resource and then calculates the estimated cost and bill amounts as well as margin percentages for the proposal on the Summary page. On the Cost tab on the Maintain Version Estimate Detail page, you can enter adjustments to the bill rate as a flat amount, a percentage, or a new rate. Time and Expense to Resource are combined.
Add attachments and key words.
To add information that you can't enter on any of the pages included in the proposal preparation process, you can upload files from your computer or server to the Attachments page that is associated with the proposal. For reporting purposes, you can categorize your proposals by key word by selecting a descriptive word or phrase from the Key Words page.
Enter adjustments.
After entering all labor and non-labor information for the particular version of the proposal, you can make adjustments to both the overall labor and the overall non-labor totals on the Maintain Proposal page by entering either a positive or negative percentage.
Enter new proposal versions.

After you finish creating an initial proposal and version, you can create different versions of the same proposal by adding a row in the Version group box on the Maintain Proposal page. As you enter new labor and non-labor information, the system calculates the totals for the particular version of the proposal and summarizes the information on the Maintain Proposal page. This feature is useful when you want to compare time and expense estimates for different versions of the same proposal. Only one version, however, can be submitted for the Contract Generation process.
Generate contracts.
After the customer accepts a version of the proposal, you can change the status of the proposal to Committed and then generate data that PeopleSoft Contracts, PeopleSoft Project Costing, and PeopleSoft Billing use to create invoices and track project-related information.