7th Echelon LLC, a Houston-based federal contractor, used to take an average of 2.5 weeks to turn a solicitation into a submitted proposal. Now it takes 2 to 4 days. An Elios Forward Deployed Pod stood up the firm's full RFx pipeline in Anthropic's Claude Cowork, with custom skills and connectors wired into the tools the team already runs. During the 30-day deployment, 7th Echelon responded to six federal solicitations without adding anyone to the team.
Winning runs on volume
Every bid runs on solicitations, regulated or not. Each one carries strict compliance requirements, heavy formatting rules, and a hard deadline. At most firms, every one of them is built by hand.
7th Echelon pursues a steady stream of government and commercial solicitations. The more opportunities the firm can respond to, the more it wins. Its capture practice was never the constraint. Ed Melton, the CEO and founder, refined his methodology across a career at Accenture, PwC, and SAP, and the firm holds a CPARS past-performance record rated exceptional.
The constraint was throughput. Solicitations arrived from GovWin, Bonfire, Harris County, and direct federal channels, each formatted differently. Every pursuit ran through the founder by hand.
AI was already in play. The knowledge did not compound.
7th Echelon was ahead of most firms its size. The team already used AI across its pursuits. But that AI lived in a prompt library. Every proposal meant pasting in prompts and re-explaining the same company context from scratch. The work got done, and the knowledge never accumulated. Pursuit number ten started roughly where pursuit number one did.
The capture intelligence itself sat in the founder's head, in slide decks, and across more than a hundred files. People could read it. Claude could not.
The opportunity was not to fix 7th Echelon. It was to make what already worked compound, so context is captured once and every proposal builds on the last.
What Elios deployed in Claude Cowork
An Elios Forward Deployed Pod stood up the pipeline inside 7th Echelon's own production environment. Building and tuning the skills and connectors was the real work. Claude does the heavy production. 7th Echelon's team keeps judgment and approval at every gate.
The system has three parts.
Notion is the brain. Ten connected databases hold every pursuit, buyer, contact, rate, asset, and submission. A buyer, a past-performance story, or a rate is entered once and referenced everywhere by relation, never copied.
Claude is the hands. Eight custom skills run in production in Claude Cowork: a dispatcher that routes any request to the right skill, plus intake, estimate, price, draft, assemble, review, and track. People direct the work in plain English instead of doing data entry.
Connectors feed it. Microsoft 365 (SharePoint and Outlook), Slack, and Otter AI pull the firm's real working context into the pipeline, so Claude drafts from what the team actually knows.
One connected flow runs from RFx drop to submitted proposal to delivered project, with a person approving anything that carries consequence.
| Stage | What Claude produces | Human gate |
|---|---|---|
| Intake | Triage, a fit score against the firm's own bid criteria, a pursuit record, and a compliance matrix | Bid / no-bid decision |
| Size and price | Effort sizing and price-to-win off one master rate card | Pricing approval |
| Draft and assemble | Volumes drafted in house voice against the compliance matrix, then assembled and format-checked | |
| Review | Staged red-team review of the draft against the solicitation, with a readiness score | Cleared to submit |
| Submit | Logged to the submissions tracker | |
| Deliver | A won opportunity converts to a project, carrying buyer, pricing, and documents with it |
Four operating rules keep it safe. Claude proposes, then a person commits. Records are enriched on create, so there are no stub entries. Data connects by relation instead of duplicating as free text. And anything with consequence, a bid decision, a price, a submission, waits for a human.
We did not import a generic capture process. We converted Ed's existing skill library and codified his methodology into the system, prototyped in production, and iterated on live feedback from his team.
Results: before and after
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Turnaround, solicitation received to proposal submitted | 2.5 weeks on average | 2 to 4 days |
| Where company context lived | The founder's head, slide decks, and 100+ files | Ten connected Notion databases, entered once and reused by relation |
| How Claude was used | A prompt library, re-prompted from scratch on every pursuit | Eight production skills in Claude Cowork, fed by connectors |
| Compliance check | From memory | Against a generated compliance matrix, before clearance to submit |
| Team size | Unchanged | Unchanged |
- Proposal turnaround cut from an average of 2.5 weeks to 2 to 4 days, per 7th Echelon's CEO.
- Six federal solicitations responded to during the 30-day deployment, June 11 to July 10, 2026, as the pipeline came online and with no change to team size.
- Eight production skills and ten connected databases live in 7th Echelon's own environment, drawing on more than a hundred files of capture intelligence that were previously readable only by people.
- Compliance and formatting checked against a matrix, not memory, before anything is cleared to submit.
- 7th Echelon owns and runs it in-house. A member of the 7th Echelon team, an information systems security officer Elios placed with the firm earlier in 2026, administers the system day to day.
"It used to take us weeks. Now it takes days."
Ed Melton, CEO and Founder, 7th Echelon
Turnaround figures are 7th Echelon's own before-and-after figures, reported by its CEO. The six-solicitation count is drawn from delivered submittal files during the engagement window.
The same problem exists wherever bids are won by hand
Federal contracting is the first instance of this pattern, not the boundary. The same manual pipeline problem applies anywhere bids are won the hard way: contract manufacturing, software, construction, healthcare, and logistics. Solicitations arrive in many formats, institutional knowledge sits with a few people, and every response restarts from zero.
If that describes how your team wins work, we can walk you through how this pipeline was stood up and what it would take to deploy the same pattern in your environment.
