Privia (discontinued)

Score9.7 out of 10

9 Reviews and Ratings

What is Privia (discontinued)?

Privia's bid capture and proposal management tools were for companies handling RFPs / RFIs in the public sector. Privia was acquired by Xait, and is no longer available for sale.

Categories & Use Cases

Proposal

Rae McFarron

Director, Proposal Center Systems in Information Technology at ACS, a Xerox Company (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

The commenting feature in Privia is a unique feature that allows us to do frequent reviews with extended project teams to do reviews concurrently and quite successfully. It allowed us to be much more efficient and have more users to more fully participate in the review process.
The version control feature works quite well for us, allowing us to completely avoid the common issues of over writing documents and loss of content.
The delegate feature allows us to provide multiple users with control over the workspace. This allows us to be much more efficient with scheduling and control.

Cons

There can be occasional lag time when working on the Web Client.
If you are copying workspaces off line for archival purposes, Privia will allow non-standard Windows file names. These files will then have to be renamed to copy them off the system.
If you copy a folder off line, if you do not have at least view access to the file, it will simply not download without any error indicated.

Return on Investment

Significant employee and team efficiency
Faster review process allowing more team members to participate
Much improved customer service for our users, who are mostly non-technical writer and managers

Usability

Danielle N. Silva Aceituno

Proposal Analyst in Corporate at The Silva Aceituno Group (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

Document Repository with standardized Folder Structures: Privia has the ability to create customized & standardized Privia workspaces with set training documents and folder structures as a foundation for each project. This helps assure that the process remains intact without jeopardizing quality throughout the lifecycle of each project / proposal.
Customized Workspace Permissions: Privia allows the Workspace owner to maintain control over who is able to view, edit, add / remove documents, add / remove additional users, etc. This is particularly helpful when dealing with classified information such as financial data, as well as ensuring that corporate strategies are protected when it comes to subcontractors. There are many instances where subcontractors would like to share certain information with the prime, but would like to keep their data separate from other subcontractors also working on the same project / proposal.
Commenting / Editing and Lock Feature Tools: Privia has the ability to allow multiple users to comment and edit upon the same document simultaneously. This is highly useful when it comes to proposal review teams. At the end of each review team, the comments are consolidated and the document lead can lock the document for editing so that no changes may be made while the comments are taken into consideration, accepted, or rejected.

Cons

Limited Licenses: Privia sells licenses by the bundle. However, the licenses can get extremely pricey. To help mitigate this issue, the company administrators do a sweep of the user licenses every 3 weeks to ensure that all licenses are being maximized. This process is very time-consuming, considering that we have hundreds of proposals going on at the same time. There have been many instances where various users have had to be deactivated because their license had not been used within the last 2 months, and then reactivated a few days later because they are working on a new proposal. Our administrators are also part of the Corporate Strategic Proposal Support Team, so this can be inconvenient if all administrators are working on multiple proposals. Time management and cross-training is key to balancing the number of active licenses.

Return on Investment

Privia has been highly successful for maintaining control over our larger efforts ($300K+). A standardized process and complimentary process tool is highly effective when coordinating between 50+ people. All users have the ability to see the schedule at a glance, which pieces of the proposal they are a part of, etc. With additional permissions set, there is little room for confusion when users do not have access to information that is not relevant or pertinent to their role.

Eileen Hammond

Proposal Editor in Sales at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

Version control
Ease of use through the desktop platform
File Sharing

Cons

Glitches with user permissions

Return on Investment

Increased efficiency through editing iterations due to version control

Angela Snyder, CF APMP, ITIL

Proposal Manager in Corporate at TASC, Inc. (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

Use as a review tool (Privia's 'comment' feature). Privia allows multiple users to make comments on a single document at the same time. Unlike Word's track changes, the Privia comment tool allows users to make in-line or general comments on a document. No merging of comments required!
Permissions at the user, file, folder, and workspace levels. With the click of a mouse, it's easy to restrict users' ability to edit, or even view, specific files and file folders. Workspace-level permissions allow administrators to restrict user access to only those projects they are working on.
Compatibility and pipeline management. Privia's web interface provides pipeline management capabilities, and interfaces with sites like GovWin, allowing users to import opportunity data with the click of a mouse button. That same opportunity data can then be used to launch an opportunity-specific workspace for document management and proposal development.
Privia's 'behind the scenes' process designer capabilities allow administrators to build workflows complete with decision points, rollback points, and the ability to assign users to tasks.

Cons

When using the pure web version of Privia (that is, without installing the thick client on a PC), the comment feature is null and void. This is because without the thick client installed, the pure web platform cannot interact with MS Office products. This creates hassles during reviews when users show up with a laptop and don't have permissions to install software.

Return on Investment

Increased employee efficiency is #1. For example, without having to manage cumbersome piles of separate, track changes comments and revisions, Privia saves time and money in the review process.
Improved reporting. Privia's web interface and pipeline management capabilities allow for generation of customizable reports to garner greater visibility and insight into business development activities.
Overall the product is a bit expensive and robust for some smaller businesses, though the functionality is definitely worth the cost.

Greg Barr

Proposal & Quality Manager in Sales at SCI Consulting Services (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

Easy to customize workflow process design with accountable and acceptor assignments, among other configurable properties, that can track the most demanding procedures and provide real-time reports on their status.
Built-in browser toolbar that automates the capture of volumes of information on government (and private sector) opportunity postings on FBO, GovWinIQ, and others.
Although there are some limitations, it has a powerful reporting capability that allows you to customize your view of the data by selecting fields and adding filtering to generate selected exportable data.

Cons

As mentioned in strengths, there are limitations to reporting in that some fields are not available or only available in one of the four report "types" when you'd like that field in another report type. Some fields are not selectable at all it would seem. My understanding is the Privia can accommodate further customization for each customer at a price, so even this limitation can be overcome.
Privia has a great version control and commenting capability that includes commenting on graphics files, but the check-out and in process are not always intuitive to many of our users and require some hand-holding. In addition, the commenting capability, which supports concurrent users, produces an export to Word with comment fields but doesn't mark up the document itself - whether that is a blessing or a curse is really up to your team and editing style.

Return on Investment

Improved efficiency in capturing opportunity data and keeping timely information available across the organization
Improved senior management reporting capability for pipeline meetings

Privia (discontinued)

What is Privia (discontinued)?

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

Privia - from a long time (really long time) user

Pros

Cons

Return on Investment

Usability

Privia in the Federal Contracting World

Pros

Cons

Return on Investment

Proposal editor loves Privia

Pros

Cons

Return on Investment

Positively Privia for Proposal Preparation

Pros

Cons

Return on Investment

Never underestimate the power of CRM

Pros

Cons

Return on Investment

Usability

Privia (discontinued)

What is Privia (discontinued)?

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

Pros

Cons

Return on Investment

Usability

Pros

Cons

Return on Investment

Pros

Cons

Return on Investment

Pros

Cons

Return on Investment

Pros

Cons

Return on Investment

Usability

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