Re-engineering the Sales Department

Successful bid preparation for complex products requires cooperation among specialists of different domains. To enable efficient cooperation between employees of different departments a computerized system capable of supporting distributed processes on possibly different hardware platforms is necessary. This paper presents a concept for cooperative bid preparation as well as concept and infrastructure designed to support the pre-sales phase for companies producing capital goods. Within the ESPRIT project No. 7131 “BIDPREP — An Integrated System for Simultaneous Bid Preparation” enterprises, research institutes and a software vendor cooperate to develop a generally applicable solution.