How to Write a Logistics Proposal - (2024)

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In this video we're going to illustrate how the Proposal Kit is used to create logistics proposals. Logistics is a very broad term so proposals for logistics could mean countless different things depending on the particular situation, the industry, the type of proposal and so on. We'll be illustrating a couple examples however you can create countless variations of logistics related proposals.

Originally logistics was a military term that related to how equipment and supplies were procured, stored and moved. These days it has a much broader meaning and it's basically applied to any complex process involving people, staff, facilities, materials and so on. Generally it's going to be involved in situations where you're moving something from one place to another.

Some examples could be the movement of equipment and supplies and staff like we just mentioned. Commercial transport of goods or producing and distributing vaccines and so on. We've selected our Transportation #5 design theme.

The design theme doesn't really matter, that's a personal visual choice. We have hundreds of design themes to pick from and quite a few would be fine for logistics related proposals. You can also brand your own using the Expert Edition.

In Proposal Kit Professional you can create your own design theme, you can customize our design themes and so on. We're just going to illustrate this first example with our Transportation #5 design which is more of a cargo hauling or trucking style design. Whatever design theme you've purchased and installed with the Wizard is what your visual design theme will be.

Whenever you're going to create a document, a proposal, business plan, report, study, RFP response, whatever you just click this button #2 Document Projects. Then click the Add New Project button and click the Pick Documents button. Now this is the screen where you're going to select all the chapters which are what we call templates that are going to make up your logistics proposal.

So the first screen you see are the 40 most common chapters that most people will use. You have a couple thousand chapters to pick from and all these tabs are just different ways for you to manage getting a set of templates that you need for your situation into your project. A quick way is just to check off some chapters like Cover Letter, Title Page, Back Page, if it's a longer proposal Table of Contents, your Executive Summary and so on.

To get to specialty chapters you can click this drop down and we can scroll down to the category for Supply Chain/Logistics/ Transportation. There's three pages of chapters so you can see Supply Chain, Logistics. These are going to be major chapter headers if you're doing importing and exporting, if you need to talk about shipping, handling, the cargo, vehicles, vessels and so on you can just scroll through all the pages of specific chapters.

If you're talking about doing transportation logistics for a specific industry so say for the energy or mining industry you might add some additional chapters specific to that. In addition to the logistics chapters or if you want to get pages specific to a situation. If you're doing service sales, product sales, a project and so on.

If you just need some chapters to talk about your company, that's very fairly common to add at the end of the proposal. You can add pages to talk about your company background, certifications, your company references, endorsements and so on. Board of directors or organizational structure that's more for maybe business plan type proposals and so on.

If you want a faster way to get a bunch of chapters for a logistic situation than just individually checking off pages you can go over to this Quick Start tab and there are hundreds and hundreds of pre–made layouts of chapters. So instead of checking off all those chapters individually I'm going to search the pre–made lists. Let me just search for a word like logistics and then we can select say the Transportation Logistics Project Proposal.

This will be a list of twenty chapters. Import that list and you can see it's got the Cover Letter, Title Page, Table of Contents and so on. Executive Summary that we could have checked off from the individual check boxes.

It's got some transportation and logistics related chapters in here which you could have found through that other drop–down list we just showed. Pages about your company, company history, qualifications. That's where you could have checked these off individually through the company list of chapters that we just showed you.

This Quick Start list just has a preset list of 20 so we can just start with that. If we want to look at the specific list we can move up and down chapters here, we can remove specific chapters if we don't need them, we can add more chapters from the library into this list. Once you get your list to match your situation that you need we'll click the OK, Use Selected Templates.

Now another way to find individual chapters if you know a word you're looking for, a chapter header, but you can't really find it in the check boxes you can just use the Search by Name tab. If we need to add a Mission Statement we just type the word mission do a search. We'll see the Mission Statement.

What if we need a chapter to talk about our vehicles. Just search for vehicle or you could use vessels or fleet or so on. Just pick a word and don't try to search for entire phrases, search for simple words.

You'll see we have a Vehicles chapter and we even have chapters related to the Vehicles chapter that you might want to look at like Vessels, Fleet, Service Area, Routes, Dispatching, Load Sequence, Loading Plan, Cargo and so on. We have our 20 chapters selected, we click this OK, Use Selected Templates when we're done selecting all of our chapters, getting them in the right order. You can see the count of documents selected, the templates.

Now we've unchecked Excel Dynamic Links for this example. This is an Expert Level feature that will link your Cost Summary, Estimate, Invoice type chapters to Excel spreadsheets. We're just going to turn that off to speed up the demo.

The next thing you'll do are these Company Data and Client Data screens. This is going to be your name and address information. Usually it's going to be put into the Title Page, Cover Letter, the About Us, Company History and so on.

Client Data this is a name address information for the person you're writing the proposal to. We've just entered a couple dummy companies in here and when we're all done selecting our templates and setting our options, entering the company and client data. When we're all ready to build the document we click OK, Save Project and Build Documents.

Click Yes and now just sit back and wait for the progress bars to complete. Okay this document has been generated we'll just click this open it and take a look. Here's the Cover Letter and you see the date, name and address information merged from the company and client data.

We scroll down and this is the design theme, this logo, font typography, the background colors and the photos. This is the Transportation #5 design. The Table of Contents, the list of all the chapters that we selected, Executive Summary and then all the chapters that are ready to start filling in.

Scroll all the way down so Cost Summary this is one of the pages that would have been directly linked into an Excel spreadsheet so as you manipulate the spreadsheet with your costs, quantities and so on the Cost Summary or Estimate or whatever financial pages you added will auto update directly into the Word document. So that is an Expert Edition feature and you can also tie these cost pages into third party quoting systems such as Quotewerks. We just scroll down to the final Back Page and you can swap out our photos with your own photos.

And that is how to generate a document in a specific design theme for a specific situation in this case logistics. I'll illustrate a second example we'll just change the design theme and we'll select Transportation #8 now we just happen to have all of our hundreds of design themes loaded in here for the demo. Only the design theme or themes you've purchased will be available to you in the list to actually use.

Transportation #8 that's more of a air transport design theme. Just like before we are going to click Document Projects button, click Add New Project, click the Pick Documents button. Also you can see if we have samples.

We have a couple hundred samples included and some will be transportation related. There's an import/export related example. We just type the word logistics and you can see logistics isn't always just cargo hauling.

We have a few different samples that have some aspect of logistics to them. Or go over to the Quick Start list and again type logistics. So any of those samples that we found over in the View Samples tab they will actually also be over in the Quick Start tab.

This Transportation Shipping Services Proposal that's the same as the one we just saw over in the samples tab. I'll just select the Transportation Shipping Services Sample and you can see this has 17 chapters whereas the other one we just showed had 20. This Quick Start list has sample content, actual pre–written sample content, not just the generic boilerplate text in the normal templates so we'll say yes we're going to pull in the sample content.

You can see again it has a Cover Letter, Title Page, Table of Contents, Back Page just like before but the interior body pages are different. This is where you can create countless variations on proposals, business plans and other documents just by selecting different subsets of those 2000 templates, chapter templates. Like before click OK, Use Selected Templates and Company Data and Client Data.

We're going to click OK, Save Project and Build Documents. Click Yes and once again we're just going to wait for the progress bars. All right, now this document's been generated we'll take a look at this and just like before we have the front Cover Letter and now instead of the boilerplate general purpose text you can see the actual sample content has been pulled in.

This is the Transportation #8 design theme the list of chapters that were pulled in and you can see the sample content in some of these pages. That is our second example, now we'll illustrate a third example. Just pick a different design theme that is not specifically transportation.

We'll pick the Global #4 design theme. This is more of a business style design theme and just like before click Document Projects, click Add New Project, click the Pick Documents button and Quick Start tab. We'll select the Supply Chain Logistics Project Proposal.

Here's our list of chapters again, Cover Letter, Title Page, Table of Contents, Executive Summary and a different set of interior pages. This specifically will cover logistics, supply chain, distribution, the facilities and so on. You can also add chapters to this if you want to talk about the personnel, staff and so on.

Or anything else like Warehousing, Inventory Management. Any other topics you might need to add you can use the Add Templates or Search by Name tab. Once we're done select our templates do the Company Data again and Client Data.

Click OK, Save Project and now we'll just build this document and wait for these progress bars. All right, this document's been generated and once again we got the Cover Letter with the data merged in. This is the Global #4 design theme now and our list of chapters with all the logistics related topics.

That is how you use Proposal Kit to generate countless variations on logistics related documents such as proposals.