How DeepOcean Reclaimed Time and Reduced Stress in Tender Production
Using XaitPorter

The team faced three major bottlenecks:

• Manual Formatting Nightmares: Tenders often contain between 5 and 15 sub-documents, and maintaining a professional, consistent layout required hours of manual adjustments, especially right before a submission deadline.
• Scattered Content: Adding repetitive attachments (especially HSEQS documents) and searching for the latest corporate or ship data was incredibly time-consuming.
• Manual Workflows: Writing, reviewing, and assigning deadlines were distributed manually, making it difficult to track overall progress.
  
  

Why did DeepOcean choose XaitPorter for document automation?

Due to DeepOcean's well-established tender production process, the company was able to overcome their initial challenges. Even so, there was room for improvement. The company began looking for a document collaboration solution that could support their already robust internal process, and gradually improve it.

Over the years, DeepOcean observed business partners and competitors using a proposal management solution that makes it easy to create large, complex, business-critical documents much faster. This was XaitPorter, the team co-authoring and automation software solution that lets companies deliver complex documents up to 70% faster.

DeepOcean put XaitPorter high on its wishlist. Then, in December 2022, their wish was granted:

"Just before Christmas, management gave us a Christmas gift – the go-ahead to buy XaitPorter licenses…!" – Ragnhild Brekke-Brandtzæg, Tender Manager, DeepOcean

The team went live less than a month after the contract was signed, meaning value was created right away. After only a short period of time, XaitPorter had been used for 15 large tenders and five smaller ones.

Which XaitPorter features streamline the proposal management workflow?

Today, DeepOcean has overcome their initial challenges by leveraging XaitPorter to gain a complete overview of progress. Centralized work means full control over the process, allowing everyone to focus on their specific tasks instead of dealing with the whole document.

It took Ragnhild Brekke-Brandtzæg and her team a few trials and errors to find a method that worked, and they tested it on another tender. After they were happy with the result, they invited more team members to use the solution.

“A few months later, we created an internal user guide. It was based on established best practices for using XaitPorter, as well as on how we at DeepOcean are supposed to set up a project, using such and such subsections and such and such formatting styles.”

They rely on these core capabilities to drive efficiency:

• Co-authoring. Knocks down walls between experts and across global offices to write and review together more quickly.
• Layout Templates. Pre-defined templates establish and protect layout, formatting and number throughout development, eliminating manual formatting.
• Content Libraries. Centralize standard content for easy retrieval, use, and maintenance, and even control master content editing. .
• Automated Workflow. Automated task visibility, hand-offs and notifications keep everyone on the team, no matter where they work, informed and on track.
• Progress Dashboards. “Furthermore, everyone has their own dashboard view, which shows a progress summary, any tasks assigned to them, and any unread comments from team members.”
• Customer Success. “It’s been great! Kristian from Xait guided us safely through the entire onboarding. He was always available by phone, and our emails were always answered promptly.”
• Process Enhancement. “After that, my colleague and I started experimenting with it on each of our tenders, and we invited three engineers into the project. We had to come up with a “recipe” for how to build the tenders and be as efficient as possible in getting to the desired outcome.”
• User Adoption. For some of Brekke-Brandtzæg’s teammates, working in XaitPorter took some getting used to. However, they soon got the hang of it. “I’m VERY positively surprised how quickly people have been able to dive in. As they learn how it all works, they really like it.”
  
  

"When sections and documents are assigned to someone, they can concentrate on their task instead of dealing with a 100-page document. Everything gets more focus-driven." – Ragnhild Brekke-Brandtzæg, Tender Manager, DeepOcean

Making the Right First Impression

At this point, the entire department had access to the system. Everyone was then invited to go through the user guide step-by-step, with support from Xait along the way. Having completed onboarding and training at DeepOcean’s Haugesund office, Brekke-Brandtzæg, her team, and Lie-Bjelland traveled to their Aberdeen office and spent a day onboarding their UK colleagues. DeepOcean's U.S. Commercial team is the next step in rolling out XaitPorter within the company.

• Up-to-Date Content. “Using XaitPorter, you always have the most recently updated information, as opposed to just copying from a previous tender and not knowing if it’s the latest and correct version.”
• Ease of Use. “It’s super-easy to drag and drop key content into a project. This allows us to make our business case as convincing as possible by focusing on what applies directly to the tender. We're way more efficient now.”
• Workflow Management. “XaitPorter makes it easy to allocate writing and reviewing tasks to team members and SMEs, and to set individual deadlines,” says Brekke-Brandtzæg.
• Streamlined Process. “The assignment wizard lets you select who will work on what and by when. Email notifications are automatically sent out, letting people know that this is their section, which they are responsible for completing.”
• Professional Tenders. “It's important to me to have our tenders look good at first glance. We submit a great deal of documentation for different tenders. The prospective client may not read everything carefully. However, the parts they do read (and you never know what they are) must have a professional look and feel.”

With XaitPorter, DeepOcean achieved their goals; eliminate manual formatting, improve content access and use, and increase tender process and progress control. This efficiency has saved them time and stress, while improving the quality of their professional tender submissions.

With the right document co-authoring and automation tool, DeepOcean enhanced the efficiency and control of their already well-developed process. That’s great news given the high demand for their services and growth.