MAINSTAY SOFTWARE CORPORATION TAKES SOURCE SELECTION AND PROPOSAL
PRICING PLATFORM TO THE NEXT LEVEL OF INTEGRATION Company to release new product in 2005 that will eliminate file sharing
for integration
ENGLEWOOD, Colo., -- For more than 20 years, Mainstay Software Corporation
has been revolutionizing the way in which procurement professionals conduct business. Comprehensive source selection and full
integration of proposals with the entire acquisition process has always been the “holy grail.” Today the company
announced that it intends to take integration one step further in order to eliminate the stovepipes that have traditionally
plagued the acquisition process, both within Government agencies and with regard to interaction between agencies and contractors.
“We have always been in business to provide the market performing proposal
cost and price analysis with the best-of-breed software product that enhance contractor and agency processes and their interaction
with one another. Our focus has been to extend these capabilities beyond proposal analysis to fully integrate proposals with
the remainder of the acquisition process,” said Dan Walkovitz, President and Founder of Mainstay Software. “Currently,
most major contractors submitting Government bids have used our PPAS product because of its strengths in integrating contractor
and Government needs. As a result of our current efforts, we expect to see this use extended into new agencies and contractors
and broadened within existing client organizations.”
Mainstay’s flagship product PPAS (Pricing Proposal & Analysis System)
is the key component of the company’s CLAAS (Closed Loop Acquisition Analysis System) software suite. Introduced in
1989, PPAS has continually gained recognition as the tool of choice for proposal pricing and source selection professionals
due to its unique, highly flexible, ad hoc analytical capabilities.
The CLAAS suite is the first true, comprehensive proposal pricing and analysis
system to be used effectively by contractors for proposal preparation and analysis. CLAAS is also used for electronic delivery
of proposals to the Government where the ad hoc and dynamic nature of source selections can be addressed using fully normalized
detailed data from each bidder, accessible at any level of detail or aggregation, when and as required, with the same product.
It is also the first product to effectively integrate proposal pricing, parametric estimating, and risk analysis and mitigation
within a single environment.
Mainstay's CLAAS suite of products include:
PPAS (Proposal Pricing & Analysis System) – The company’s
flagship product used by many government contractors and aerospace/defense industry agencies for preparation, analysis, presentation
and evaluation of proposals. Many major defense contractors and systems integrators have favorably compared PPAS to their
own internal proposal pricing software and now view PPAS as a cost-effective tool that is far more responsive to their exacting
requirements.
STAR (System Trade and Risk Analysis) – Designed to provide the user
the ability to better understand and accurately assess, manage and mitigate performance, cost and schedule risks.
ParaModel – A parametric estimating tool that provides cost and schedule
estimating support for projects that require development, production, modification, integration or testing of hardware, software,
or both.
Government source selection teams using PPAS are able to take complex pricing
proposals comprising multiple contractors and rapidly and completely analyze them from all perspectives. This is a result
of the product’s ability to automatically apply any change throughout the entire proposal and provide reports of the
effect on a totally dynamic basis. This enables PPAS to be uniquely responsive to the totally free-form nature of the entire
source selection and decision making process.
Alternatives to PPAS for Government competitive cost and price analysis are
few. Spreadsheets, the most common option, are hampered by the integrity problems typical to this class of product. More limiting,
though, is the inability of spreadsheets to deal effectively with more than two or three integrated views of very complex,
multi-dimensional proposals, thus preventing cost analysts from responding to normal source selection issues and questions.
Contractor-developed or other commercial pricing software does satisfy this need well on individual proposals. However, comparison
of multiple proposals, each with unique accounting and pricing structures, which is demanded in source selections, is impossible
with this approach. Only PPAS fulfills all the needs of source selection teams and contractors with flexibility and responsiveness
to dynamic circumstances.
Building on the already unprecedented integration for proposals Mainstay is
known for, the company intends to introduce a whole new concept to the proposal pricing and source selection community –
integration without file sharing to eliminate the burdensome stovepipes hampering progress in any proposal process. The working
name for the software platform for achieving this is First AIDE.
“First AIDE will eliminate the need for contractors to upload proposal
data from subcontractors through typical file transfer processes, thus enabling automatic integration of sanitized subcontractor
data,” Walkovitz said. “This is proposal integration on a level that has to date has only been a dream. In the
end, this will lead to more effective content analysis, which will result in significantly better cost volumes and more wins.”
Mainstay Software Corporation was founded in June 1983
in Colorado. The company was established to continue developing and marketing Mainstay’s one-of-a-kind OLAP (On-Line
Analytical Processing) database, Mainstay, which was developed in the early 1980s at Corporate Management Systems, Inc., a
decision support consulting company.
From 1984 to 1986, Mainstay was successful in developing
and marketing several versions of the Mainstay product. In 1986, Mainstay Software began to focus its attention on the aerospace/defense
industry. PPAS (Proposal Pricing & Analysis System), the company’s flagship product was developed using Mainstay
and was introduced in 1989. Today, it is used by many government contractors for preparation, analysis and presentation of
proposals, as well as for the analysis and evaluation of proposals by government agencies themselves. Mainstay genuinely expects
to transform the acquisition process so well improved with their previous efforts through their efforts with First AIDE.M
