Altura V3 is finally here! It is the result of a year of hard work. This updates brings new and improved features to manage your bids and automate manual tasks in you daily process.
Whether you want to make better decisions on bids, cut down on manual tasks, or improve teamwork, there's something for you in this update.
Here's everything you need to know about Altura's third software update.
What is Altura V3?
In September of 2022, we launched Altura Version (v) 2; because we noticed that the daily work of bid managers could be even more efficient, we — unconsciously — started V3. We listened carefully to the needs of our customers. Based on this, our developers have improved features and added new features.
Our customers needed faster access to certain features. Their work required new ways to avoid repetitive tasks. Moreover, it was important that they had a place where they could keep track of each other's progress. From fellow bid managers, but also from account managers, the legal department, operations and finance.
Due to the amount of improvements, we no longer recognize our own product - Altura V3 was born.
Step 1: Bid Qualification
New: Opportunity Lists
Opportunity Lists (previously named Search Profiles) are now available to anyone inside your organization. Admin users can create opportunity lists from the settings menu using their predefined set of filters called Collection Filters.
New: New Opportunities
New Opportunities is a new way to signaling works. In New Opportunities, everything starts with following an Opportunity List. The moment you follow an Opportunity List you’ll start receiving daily emails with a link to the New Opportunities available that day inside the platform. All new opportunities are now available inside this view on the platform and not on separate emails.
You can accept or reject opportunities from this view and include reasons for rejection. You can also review the decision made on every opportunity in the Opportunity List. If you want to pursue a new Opportunity, you can create a new project for it from here or send it directly to the Bid/No-Bid qualification stage.
Improved: Expected Tenders
New expected tenders will now appear under your New Opportunities view. Instead of checking a separate and static list, you will get notified when a new expected tender is available. You can also configure when to be notified of a new expected tender. Whether you need to know 6 months or 2 years in advance, you can plan your strategy accordingly.
Improved: User Roles and Permissions
We’ve improved what you can do with roles and permissions in Altura V3. Now you can create custom roles that match the needs of your organization with different access rights depending on their actual role around bids. Furthermore, you can give different rights to each user role for each task within Altura. With these updates, you will now be able to set rights like legal having viewing rights to boards, while sales can view and edit boards, reasons for rejection them and uploading documents to your Knowledge Hub (previously called document vault).
Step 2: Bid Planning
Our project's module is also getting big improvements in Altura V3. Here’s everything we’ve changed to help you get more done for each bid.
New: Boards
Boards allow you to manage a bid throughout the different phases of a project, from qualification to evaluation. In Altura V2 you had one board for all projects, but that’s changing with Altura V3.
You can now create multiple boards based on the needs of your business. You can create boards per business unit, per project stage or per team. Furthermore, you can customise boards, pin boards you use frequently to your navigation menu and even set up dedicated workflows for each board. What? Custom workflows? Yes. Keep reading ;)
New: Custom Workflows
Workflows allow you to automate the creation of tasks as you move a project through its different phases. For instance, you can configure your workflow so when you move a project from the Qualification to the Strategy phase, it creates automatic tasks for each team member. Like scheduling a kick-off session or reminding marketing to upload competitor and pricing information.
Each board can have its phases and have dedicated steps to complete and per phase. So you can have dedicated boards for instances when each team handles a different type of bid, or bids in different business units requiring different processes or criteria.
New: My Tasks
You can now manage all your tasks across every project in one single view. Handy, right? From this view, you can assign deadlines, check off completed ones or reassign tasks to other project members.
Step 3: Bid Writing
With Altura V3, we’re bringing AI to your proposal writing process with the new Proposal Writer. And there’s more. We are also improving our other AI capabilities, Proposal Search and Document chat.
New: Proposal Writer
Our proposal writer helps you create drafts for different sections of your proposal in just a few seconds. We use a secure AI model that doesn’t share your data outside of your account and uses your context to produce more accurate results than other standard models such as Microsoft’s CoPilot or ChatGPT. You can provide specific context per project for even more accurate results.
How does our proposal writer work?
The proposal writer reviews your bid project, checking requirements and researching previous proposals to gather the most relevant input to create a draft in seconds. You can then ask it to rewrite, shorten and other quick actions to refine the text to match your needs, helping you get a first version ready in seconds, not hours. You can even add your text and have him review it and rewrite it, so you can choose your favorite option
Improved: Proposal Search
Proposal Search gets some new functionalities with Altura V3. It is now able to give you results based on keywords or simply a description of a proposal, so you don’t need the full name to find it. Plus, you can now search for evaluation data from past proposals!
Improved: Document Chat
The Document Chat has also been updated, to include the history of questions both you and your team have asked each document.
General
New: Navigation Menu
The menu bar has been redesigned to help you move quicker throughout the platform. We’ve moved it to the left side and can be minimized so you can better focus on the task at hand. Each section is also now expandable, so you can find the right page to move to before you switch from your current view. Settings and Support are also directly available on the menu bar.
Multilingual Support
Great news for our international teams on the platform! Altura V3 is now available in English, Dutch and French. ‘Lekker!’
Top updates from V2 to V3.
General
- The navigation bar is now placed on the left side of your screen.
- Settings and Support are now available from the navigation bar.
- Altura is now available in English, Dutch, and French.
- Altura now has a built-in dark mode.
Bid Qualification
- Search Profiles are now replaced by Opportunity lists.
- Opportunity lists are available for anyone in the organization.
- You can review opportunities directly in the New Opportunities view.
- You can now get an AI summary inside a new opportunity.
- You can now ask questions to the documents inside a Bid using the Doc Chat.
- You can now review the history of questions everyone has asked to a bid document.
- You can see approved/rejected opportunities in the New Opportunities view.
- List of expected tenders are now updated dynamically instead of once a year.
- You can add new question types to your checklists to match your custom process.
- You can now set up sections inside your Bid/No-Bid checklists
- You can now request qualification approvals via the platform.
Bid Planning
- You can now create and customize boards for different bid types, teams and more.
- Boards can automatically create different types of tasks as your bid progresses.
- You can now manage all your tasks across multiple projects in My Tasks.
Bid Writing
- You can now extract information from past proposals in your Document Vault with the new Proposal Search.
- You can now generate an AI draft text using the information extracted from past proposals
- You can now refine the AI-generated text using quick actions like Shorten and Rewrite.
