Published with authorization. Company kept anonymous by confidentiality agreement.
How an infrastructure project company went from managing public bids in spreadsheets to operating a fully automated cycle — from opportunity capture on the government platform to project delivery.
The Context
Public tenders do not forgive mistakes: strict legal deadlines, demanding documentation, and financial proposals that have to be right before they are submitted. This team ran all of it in spreadsheets, and learned whether a bid was profitable only after handing it in.
The client managed this entire process manually: tracking opportunities in Excel, costing items without an automated margin system, creating local folders by hand per project, and with no visibility into execution status once a bid was won.
No capture system
Government platform opportunities were reviewed separately. Real risk of missing deadlines or duplicating opportunities.
Costing without logic
No differentiation between markup, contingency, and tax. No automatic margin indicator to know if a proposal was profitable before submitting it.
Execution without a system
Once a project was awarded, there was no structure to track expenses, tasks, or delivery deadlines. Everything lived in the team's memory.
No proactive alerts
The team had to manually remember deadlines. A missed reminder in public procurement has legal consequences.
The Solution
The design covered the full cycle: from when an opportunity appears on the platform to when the awarded project is delivered and enters its warranty period.
Phase 1 — Week 1
SIP: Proposal Initialization System
Integration with the government opportunities hub: automated capture of new opportunities (title, entity, bid type, key dates, amount). Automatic creation of Google Drive folder structure per project. Immediate team alert via Telegram. External password-protected form for capture from mobile in the field.
Phase 2 — Weeks 2–4
Cost & Profitability Engine
Item-level costing system with automatic proration of global costs (freight, duties, insurance). Separate calculation of markup, contingency, and tax (7%). Real-time margin traffic light: green if margin meets target, yellow to review, red below threshold. Proposal statuses with full flow through to documented win or loss.
Phase 3 — Weeks 5–8
Awarded Project Execution Hub
When a bid is won, the system automatically creates the project, links the quoted items, and generates planned expenses from the original (immutable) costing. Tiered reminder system based on delivery deadline. Claims and appeals management. Automatic legal document sync to Drive. 10 Telegram notifications organized by topic.
Key Design Decisions
🔒 Immutable CostBreakdown
The winning proposal costs are copied (not referenced) to execution. The original budget snapshot is protected indefinitely for variance comparison.
🔔 Tiered reminders
3 levels based on deadline: short projects get 1 alert at 50%, long projects get alerts at 5 thresholds. A single daily consolidated message at 7 AM to avoid overwhelming the team.
📂 Automatic Drive structure
Each new opportunity generates its folder in Drive: bid document, proposal, award, and execution. Legal documents sync automatically to the correct folder based on the event.
⚖️ Integrated legal management
7-day claims timer from acceptance. Appeals system that blocks project activation until resolution. Audited log of every status change.
The system was designed with the rule that no planning data can be altered retroactively. The integrity of the original numbers is non-negotiable in a procurement business.
"Before, we had to remember the deadlines. Now the system remembers them for us — and alerts us with enough time to act."
Operating system delivered by Metacube Studio · Q1 2026
Tech Stack
The system has been in production since Q1 2026 with the client's full team. 20+ active automations, 10 daily Telegram notifications in production, and zero manual intervention in the main flow.
If you handle public procurement, projects with legal deadlines, or any proposal-to-execution cycle, we can build the system you need.
Book a Clarity Session30 minutes. We look at how your business runs today and you leave with a concrete proposal: what to build, in what order, and what it costs.