Sulmara Subsea

Established in 2018, Sulmara Subsea is an international survey services contractor that provides quality personnel, responsiveness, and an innovative approach to services across the offshore services sector within a strong and committed QHSE culture.

Sulmara Subsea focuses on decarbonizing the energy industry through the use of uncrewed and remote survey solutions.

The company is headquartered in Glasgow with regional hubs in Houston and Singapore, and offices worldwide.

Business Challenge

Like any international services contractor, Sulmara Subsea submits proposals in a very dynamic environment, where bid volumes and ITT requests can increase or decrease week over week. Due to the company’s ambitious growth journey, these documents of various complexity had to be created and submitted at an increasing pace, with teams collaborating across regions.

The only catch was that Sulmara did not have the best tools to produce complex and highly polished bids and proposals at scale. Like many other companies, they used a file-based solution:

“We had an archaic style of working – we were using Word for all our bids and proposals,” says Jeremy Steward, Commercial Manager at Sulmara Subsea. “Typically, the proposal part is the last thing that gets put together, especially if you have something heavily subcontracted. There's a lot of quotes that you have to go out and get.”

Sulmara had to do a lot of things before they could begin piecing the actual proposal together, including budgeting and getting executive approvals.

This is often where all the formatting issues come in, especially if you're trying to work with multiple people on the same document through some sort of shared space.

Typically, documents have to be split into several parts as they grow in size. Things start going awry in terms of pagination, graphics, and layout at this point. When you fix something in one place, something else will change in another. Often, teams spend hours going back and forth fixing issues before they are able to print. The same was true for Sulmara:

“The issues we faced created a tremendous amount of time being used on various formatting issues. At the zero hour, when the bids were due, there would be high stress and late nights. It was really tough to get that proposal across the line.”