How Ancilla Technologies Cut Proposal Time by 50% with CLEATUS
– Scott Messmer, Growth and Business Development Director, Ancilla Technologies and Services
About Ancilla Technologies and Services
Ancilla Technologies and Services, Inc. is a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) headquartered in Clarksburg, Maryland, founded on Veterans Day in 2015. The name comes from the Latin for "an aid to achieving or mastering something difficult," and that is the business: teams of dedicated professionals who act as trusted advisors, helping federal clients identify and solve their toughest challenges.
Ancilla operates across three practice areas: management consulting, operations and administrative services, and technology services. The firm is a prime contractor on SeaPort-NxG, the Department of the Navy's primary services vehicle, positioning it to support commands like Naval Sea Systems Command, Naval Supply Systems Command, Military Sealift Command, and the Office of Naval Research, and it holds seats on additional vehicles including CIO-SP3 and OMNIBUS IV.
Strong past performance and real contract vehicles were never the problem. The problem was throughput: a lean team could only push so many pursuits through a manual capture and proposal process at once.
Challenge
A Vehicle-Holding Prime Stuck at One Submission a Month
For a professional services firm, every hour spent on capture administration is an hour not billed to a client or spent with an agency customer. Ancilla's business development function was carrying the full weight of that trade-off.
Discovery was a manual, multi-portal grind: The team spent around 10 hours every week searching for opportunities across multiple portals like SAM.gov, reading listings one at a time to figure out which were worth pursuing.
Bid tracking lived in spreadsheets: Pursuit status, team tasks, and deadlines were managed by hand. Keeping the spreadsheet current was its own job, and nobody had a live view of where each bid actually stood.
Every proposal started from a blank page: With no reusable scaffolding, a single proposal consumed roughly 120 hours from start to submission, and time-consuming formatting and packaging ate the final stretch before every deadline.
Compliance requirements were slow to decode: Understanding what a solicitation actually demanded, from evaluation criteria to clause-level requirements, took about 4 hours per contract, and complex compliance requirements always carried the risk of a missed detail.
The math was unforgiving. Between searching, decoding, drafting, tracking, and packaging, Ancilla could realistically submit one RFP/RFQ response per month. The capability and the contract vehicles were in place; the hours were not.
Solution
CLEATUS Compressed Every Stage of the Pursuit, from First Read to Final Package
Ancilla implemented CLEATUS after an initial review of the platform, and the evaluation criteria that won them over was guidance: AI with enough structure around it that the team always knew the next step, rather than a blank chatbot waiting for the right prompt.
Solicitations broken down in seconds: The GovCon Copilot breaks a solicitation package down as soon as it lands, structuring scope, deadlines, evaluation criteria, and the compliance matrix automatically. When the team has a question about a contract, they get instant, citation-backed answers pointing to the exact source passage, which cut the time to understand a contract's details from about 4 hours to 2.
First drafts instead of blank pages: The AI Proposal Suite generates outlines and first drafts grounded in Ancilla's own documents and past performance. Formatting and packaging, previously a deadline-week scramble, now follow the structure the platform builds from the start. Proposal development dropped from roughly 120 hours to 60.
Spreadsheets replaced with a shared pipeline: Pursuit Management views give the whole team a live picture of every bid, its stage, and who owns which task, so coordination happens in the pipeline instead of in a spreadsheet nobody fully trusts.
One searchable home for company documents: The Document Hub turned scattered capability statements, past performance write-ups, and corporate documents into a central, searchable repository that the AI draws on for every draft and every answer.
Bid/no-bid decisions backed by data: With faster comprehension and better fit signals up front, the team kills weak pursuits early and commits its recovered hours to the opportunities worth winning.
- ✕Manually searching for opportunities across multiple portals like SAM.gov
- ✕Tracking bid progress and team tasks on spreadsheets
- ✕Starting every proposal from a blank page
- ✕Decoding complex compliance requirements by hand
- ✕Time-consuming proposal formatting and packaging
- Solicitations broken down in seconds with citation-backed answers
- A live, shared pipeline in Pursuit Management views
- First drafts and outlines grounded in company documents
- Compliance requirements structured automatically on day one
- Formatting and packaging that follow the structure from the start
Results
The transformation shows up as simple arithmetic: half the time per proposal, half the time searching, and three times the submissions going out the door each month with the same team.
• 50% less time per proposal: From roughly 120 hours per proposal to 60 • 3x monthly submission volume: RFP/RFQ responses went from 1 per month to 3 • 5 hours per week recovered from discovery: Opportunity searching dropped from 10 hours weekly to 5 • Contract comprehension in half the time: Understanding a solicitation's details went from about 4 hours to 2 • A live pipeline instead of a spreadsheet: Bid progress and team tasks are visible to everyone in Pursuit Management views
– Scott Messmer, Growth and Business Development Director, Ancilla Technologies and Services
Why It Worked for Ancilla
• A throughput problem, not a capability problem: Ancilla already had the vehicles, the past performance, and the team. CLEATUS attacked the bottleneck that was actually capping growth: hours per pursuit.
• Citation-backed answers for compliance-heavy work: Federal professional services solicitations are dense with clause-level requirements. Answers that point to the source passage let the team move fast without gambling on compliance.
• Guidance, not just a model: What sold the team during the initial review was structured AI with clear guidance at every step, so the platform's functionality translated into output from week one.
• Consulting content, centralized: A professional services firm's proposal raw material is its people and past performance. The Document Hub made all of it searchable and reusable instead of buried in folders.
• Collaboration where the work happens: Replacing tracking spreadsheets with shared Pursuit Management views meant the team scaled submissions without adding coordination overhead.
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