Bid Hub concept overview

In this article:

• What is Bid Hub?
  • Pre-requisites
  • What steps will I need to take to set this up?
• Bid Hub workspace
• Bid workspaces
• Data collection
• Need more information?
  
  

What is Bid Hub?

Bid Hub is not really an Atlas feature on its own, but more a combination of Atlas and M365 features to support bid management. This includes a Bid Hub workspace, one or more ConneX Studio workspace templates to create individual Bids, custom lists to store bid data for reporting, and Power Automate workflows to ensure the data is recorded. Data could come from a SharePoint list or a Microsoft Form with a small amount of configuration.

You may use this concept for something other than Bids depending on your organisational needs; for example for Projects, Sales Opportunities or other high volume activities that require a consistent data structure and reporting.

Please note that ClearPeople will not be able to assist with the creation of Power BI reports, but we can work with you to ensure that the data will be usable in Power BI. We may be able to help with Power Automate by providing templates for the required workflows.

Pre-requisites

• Atlas installed on your M365 tenant,
• ConneX Studio licensed for Atlas,
• Power Automate licensing for M365,
• Power BI licensing for M365.
  
  

What steps will I need to take to set this up?

• Create an Atlas workspace to act as the Bid Hub;
  • Include a custom SharePoint List to aggregate important bid data for reporting.
• Create a ConneX Studio template to use when creating each new Bid;
  • Include a custom SharePoint List to store the individual bid data,
  • And include any content e.g. Documents that are needed in every Bid.
• Create a Power Automate flow to push data entered via a Microsoft Form or similar into each individual Bid list and the All Bids list.
• Create a Power Automate flow to push updates from the All Bids list to the individual Bid, so that the data can be changed from the All Bids list if required. While not required this step is highly recommended.
• Create a Power BI report using data from the All Bids list. This is only required if you need the ability to report on the data, and of course could be done at a later date.

Bid Hub workspace

Below is an example of a possible Bid Hub homepage. From here you can give users access to the individual bids, functionality to create new bids, links to other bid-related systems, or anything else you can usually do with a SharePoint workspace. 

You might also like to include an ConneX web part showing all workspaces using the Bid template.

This workspace will contain the "All Bids" list which stores the data for all bids that you want to report on in Power BI. You could also put some generic informational documents here, but it may make more sense to include those in the Bid Workspace template if they need to be modified for each Bid for example.

Bid workspaces

An important part of setting up Bid Hub is having one or more ConneX Studio workspace templates so that every bid will have the same consistent custom data list, homepage layout etc.

Each Bid workspace will contain a "Bid Data" list which stores the data for the specific bid, to let you easily show this data on the Bid homepage.

Data collection

The easiest way to collect the data for Bids is to use a SharePoint list or Microsoft Form. When the form is submitted or a new list item created, this will trigger a Power Automate flow to push the data into the All Bids list, and from there into the individual Bid workspace.

Need more information?

This article may be updated over time, but it is really intended as a summary rather than a step-by-step guide. If you'd like a demo of Bid Hub or have more questions please feel free to contact your CSM or support team.