Accelerating Proposal Content Generation: How HORNE Streamlined Processes with RohanRFP

The Challenge

Initially established as an accounting firm in 1962, HORNE has evolved into a leading disaster recovery consulting firm. With a focus on administering federally funded grants and recovery programs, HORNE has become synonymous with efficient and effective disaster recovery solutions, aiding major recovery efforts following Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane María in Puerto Rico, Sandy in New York, and more.

HORNE is committed to breaking barriers with innovative approaches across its business to ensure their clients are getting the best support and solutions possible. Core to the culture is a focus on “Reaching our Full Potential. Together.”

In its continual pursuit of excellence, the firm has experienced rapid growth over the last few years due to the reputation for excellence in delivery. To support this growth, in 2023 the company sought a technology solution to empower their proposal and capture teams to effectively leverage their existing corpus of historical content and data. As a fast growth company it was also imperative to relieve those teams from time-consuming and repetitive proposal research and writing tasks so they could concentrate on producing the best possible solutions for clients while optimizing growth.

Ultimately, HORNE sought to drive efficiency and collaboration for their teams, while facilitating smarter and faster access to an extensive library of proposal materials, past performance information and technical documentation to enhance the efficiency of the content drafting process.

The Solution

In pursuit of this goal, HORNE enlisted the assistance of Rohirrim to aid both proposal and non-proposal teams in democratizing data, enhancing accessibility to enterprise information, and generating proposal content.

Rohirrim’s purpose-built, organization-specific generative AI platform, RohanRFP, securely leverages proprietary enterprise data to produce unique business and technical content crafted in the company’s distinctive voice. With RohanRFP, proposal teams can easily search and access information within their libraries, such as personnel biographies, without the need for exhaustive searches through resumes allowing for massive time savings and improved productivity.

Moreover, RohanRFP crafts contextually relevant original content for proposals, grants, and any other content-related requirements utilizing proprietary historical data sourced from within the enterprise.

The Impact

Clayton Crockett, a proposal writer at HORNE, remarked, “RohanRFP has truly unlocked our library of resources. Our team relies on it daily for its efficiency in finding information compared to traditional time-consuming keyword searches on other platforms.”

Moreover, RohanRFP has streamlined the early proposal drafting process for HORNE. “Previously, we’d spend countless hours combing through our resources for relevant and successful proposals on specific topics that we could repurpose. Now, we can simply prompt RohanRFP to generate comprehensive, referenced content that addresses RFP requirements in our own voice,” said Crockett.

“With RohanRFP we can locate relevant materials and draft out whole sections in a couple hours rather than days. This includes technical content that would typically necessitate input from our technical team.”

Additionally, RohanRFP’s flexibility enables its usage beyond proposals, facilitating document searches, drafting, and providing valuable insights for various projects and practice areas.

Michael Chua, a Senior Manager in HORNE’s Government Services Technical Advisory Group, explained: “Our technical advisory team includes SMEs with diverse disaster recovery, federal programs, and program management experience, offering assistance to clients nationwide. Using RohanRFP, we’ve curated secondary libraries of technical documentation which serve as a knowledge repository for our SMEs. This includes a wide range of resources such as past deliverables, memos, checklists, presentations, and publicly available materials like federal register notices, policies, statutes, and other programmatic resources.”

Chua continued: “Whenever there’s a query from a client or a need for information regarding a program we’re administering, we engage RohanRFP as a first resource, and the platform quickly helps us finds the answer – or at the very least, points us in the right direction.”

The Future

A year into deployment, RohanRFP has empowered HORNE to dramatically hone its proposal writing process, streamline various aspects of operations, and expedite response times – freeing up bandwidth to create value on other initiatives where the expertise of proposal writers is indispensable.

What does the future hold? “We’re thrilled about what’s on the horizon,” said Chua. “Rohirrim has provided us with their development roadmap, and we’re eager to witness the rollout of new features and capabilities, particularly those focused on drafting highly technical content and standard operating procedures (SOPs). Both were significant factors influencing our decision to adopt the platform.”

Chua added: “Thanks to the results we’ve seen from RohanRFP, there has been increased interest from other program teams and practice groups within HORNE, and we’re excited to see how we can leverage the platform to help their teams!”