About Aurex

Aurex is a mission-focused aerospace and defense company headquartered in Huntsville, Alabama, with offices across the United States. The company designs, tests, and delivers advanced capabilities spanning hypersonic systems, missile defense, space domain awareness, communications, test and launch support, and positioning hardware and software platforms. Its offerings include integrated engineering services, modeling and simulation, autonomous systems, resilient networks, and rapid prototyping in support of complex offense, space, and national security missions. Aurex serves the Department of Defense, Missile Defense Agency, NASA, and other defense and national security agencies, advancing technology readiness and mission assurance across critical aerospace and defense domains.

Laura Jensen leads BD Operations at Aurex, overseeing business development infrastructure across the company's multiple business units. With backgrounds in SAP, Salesforce, and c4c, she brings a systems-level perspective to building scalable BD processes for a growing aerospace and defense organization.

The Challenge

Five Business Units, No Shared System, and a Full-Time Reporting Burden

When Laura Jensen joined Aurex, the company's BD function was fragmented across five separate business units, each operating independently. A single Unanet CRM license served the entire organization, and most BD data lived in individual workstreams with no standard format and no unified pipeline.

"Imagine we were five small companies all doing our own little thing," said Laura Jensen, BD Operations Lead at Aurex.

The consequences showed up across the BD lifecycle:

• No single pipeline with historical data across business units

• No standardized capture process or shared system of record

• Weekly reporting required hours of manual data collection and formatting

• Leadership and investors had no real-time visibility into pipeline health

The root cause was a complete absence of shared infrastructure.

Solution

1. Unified Pipeline and System of Record Across Business Units

GovDash became the foundation Aurex needed to consolidate its BD operations. Four VPs of business development, previously running independent processes, were brought onto a single platform. Laura built out a unified pipeline with standardized data, historical opportunity tracking, and capture notes that any team member could access and build on.

GovDash now functions as 100% of Aurex's CRM, 100% of their proposal workflow, and the system of record for all activity up to contract. Gate reviews, previously handled offline, live in GovDash alongside capture data. If work happens outside the platform, it gets pushed back into the opportunity. All BD activity lives in GovDash.

2. Automated Reporting That Replaced a Full-Time Job

Before GovDash, producing Aurex's weekly BD reporting was a full-time job. Data had to be manually gathered from multiple sources, formatted, and compiled into executive presentations.

With GovDash, that same report now takes approximately 2.5 hours per week, while before it took multiple days. Laura pulls a data export, pastes it into a pivot table, and the charts self-populate. The weekly output covers pipeline summary, quarterly forecast, proposal timelines, division-by-stage breakdowns, and week-over-week and month-over-month growth, all drawn from live GovDash data.

Leadership and the company's private equity investors now have real-time pipeline visibility on demand.

3. Customization Built for Aerospace and Defense

Aurex operates at the intersection of highly specialized engineering work and fast-turn proposal cycles. Each opportunity follows a different path, and each business unit has its own pace.

GovDash's customization capabilities allowed Laura to build capture plan templates tailored to the size and type of each opportunity. Teams working high-velocity product-based contracts follow a streamlined path matched to their actual workflow. As Aurex has grown, she has added new companies, locations, and capability areas directly in the platform.

"What GovDash has allowed us to do with customization has allowed us to really utilize all of the features, which other software can't do," said Laura Jensen.

Results

From Blank Slate to Fully Reportable Multi-User Organization in Under Six Months

With GovDash, Aurex built a functioning BD infrastructure from scratch:

• Four VPs of BD and a BD Operations lead unified on a single platform

• Weekly reporting reduced from a full-time job to approximately 2.5 hours per week

• Full pipeline visibility for leadership and private equity investors in real time

• 100% of CRM, proposal, and gate review workflows consolidated in GovDash

• Standardized capture data and historical opportunity records established across all business units

"GovDash is the system of record that has allowed us to go from a blank slate to a fully reportable multi-user organization in less than six months," said Laura Jensen, BD Operations Lead at Aurex.

Why GovDash?

Aurex evaluated four platforms before selecting GovDash. One was eliminated immediately for lacking GCC High support. A second was eliminated for poor usability. Of the two remaining, GovDash won on the depth of its pipeline planning capabilities.

Ease of use was also a deciding factor. Laura came to the evaluation with experience in SAP, Salesforce, and c4c, platforms known for their complexity. GovDash's interface made clear that people who had worked through difficult software were involved in building it to be simple.

The sales experience reinforced the decision. Working through the evaluation process, she said, "I couldn't have been more excited to bring on a software based on their enthusiasm."

Advice for New Users

"I created a dummy proposal and ran it through all of the evaluation software offerings so I could get an apples-to-apples comparison," said Laura Jensen. "That really informed my decision across the board."

Her advice for contractors evaluating BD platforms: test the tool against real work before committing, and prioritize flexibility. Every team and every proposal type is different. The right platform adapts to how your teams actually work and gives them the shortest, most effective path to submission.

"It's a hundred percent our CRM. It's a hundred percent our proposal tool. It's our system of record for all things up to contract," said Laura Jensen.