Capture Workspace · Platform 05
From opportunity discovery to controlled defence submission.
A defence tender is not won in the writing. It is won in the weeks before: knowing the notice exists, deciding honestly whether to bid, and holding every requirement, every piece of evidence and every approval in one place where nothing quietly goes missing. Capture Workspace is the private, authenticated layer above the four public Iron Shield platforms, and it is where a pursuit is managed from the moment it appears to the moment an authorised person signs it off.
How automated is it
Ninety per cent of the labour. None of the decisions.
Automation is not one number, and in defence the split matters more than the total. Capture Workspace removes the reading, the cross-referencing, the re-typing and the chasing. It does not remove the judgement, and it is built so that it cannot.
Of the labour, automated
Detection, de-duplication, version preservation, capability matching, requirement extraction, amendment comparison, compliance sweeps, alerting and task creation run without anyone asking. Reading a two-hundred-page solicitation and building a compliance matrix by hand is two days of work. Here it is minutes, and the citations survive.
Of the decisions, automated
Ten authorisation gates, bid/no-bid, product configuration, pricing, legal exception, export control, security declaration, contract deviation, certification, signature and final submission, are held for an authorised person in your own organisation. The system will not decide them, and there is no configuration that lets it.
Between the two sits the work the system drafts and a person owns: capture plans, the bid/no-bid analysis, proposal sections and the submission package. Everything generated starts in draft and is labelled by its information basis: sourced fact, company-entered, estimate, assessment, assumption or unknown, so an editor can see at a glance which sentences are load-bearing.
The problem it solves
Most teams run two tools that never speak to each other
One subscription finds the tender. Another helps write the response. Nothing carries the thread between them, and the seam is where tenders are lost, not in the writing, in the handover.
The two-tool stack
What falls through
- The match reasoning stays in the discovery tool. By the time anyone writes, nobody can reconstruct why this pursuit was worth the effort.
- An amendment lands in one system. The other has no idea the deadline moved or a mandatory clause appeared.
- Requirements are shredded in one place, evidence lives on a shared drive, and nothing checks that a cited certificate is still in date.
- The approval to submit happens over email. There is no record of what the approver was actually shown.
- Roughly $45,000 to $50,000 a year, across two products, to still work the seam by hand.
Capture Workspace
One record, end to end
- The match, its sixteen weighted factors and the bid/no-bid decision sit on the same record as the response.
- An amendment is compared against the version on file and its impact is traced onto every affected requirement, section, task and approval.
- Requirements cite the exact page and section. Evidence is approved, dated and jurisdiction-checked before it can be cited.
- Every approval records the approver, the time, whether two-factor was satisfied, and the immutable payload they were shown.
- From $14,400 a year for a team of ten, with the thread intact.
See the full comparison, including what the two-tool stack still does better →
The thread
Nine stages from notice to signature
Each stage writes to the same record. Nothing is re-keyed, nothing is exported to be re-imported, and every stage marked for a person is one the system is not permitted to complete alone.
Detect
Official sources are polled and every notice is stored with its issuing authority, URL, reference number, publication date and file hash. Duplicates and related notices are identified across sources.
AutomatedNormalise
Values, currencies, deadlines and time zones are normalised without silently mixing figures. A revised notice becomes a new version; the prior one is never overwritten.
AutomatedMatch
The opportunity is compared against your capability profile across sixteen weighted factors. Each returns a verdict, the evidence behind it and what is missing.
AutomatedDecide
Twenty-one weighted criteria are scored and unresolved assumptions listed. The recommendation is prepared automatically; the decision is recorded by an authorised approver.
Authorisation gatePlan
A capture plan skeleton is generated: win themes, discriminators, gaps, risks, milestones and decision gates, every item labelled by information basis and starting unreviewed.
Drafted, you own itAnalyse
Requirements are extracted from the solicitation with a citation to the exact page and section, classified mandatory, desirable or evaluated, and confidence-scored. Low-confidence extractions are flagged for review.
AutomatedRespond
Sections are assembled only from evidence you have approved, in date and permitted in that jurisdiction, citing every source. Where none exists it raises an explicit evidence requirement.
Drafted, you own itVerify
The compliance matrix is checked for unresolved mandatories, unevidenced claims, expired evidence, unacknowledged amendments and missing owners. Findings become owned tasks.
AutomatedAuthorise
The package is built, file set, required filenames, hashes, checklist, deadline with time zone, unresolved exceptions, and reaches “Ready for Authorized Submission”. Then it stops.
Authorisation gateStage ten is a person. An authorised executive approves, returns or rejects the package and performs the submission. Capture Workspace does not submit a binding tender, does not bypass portal authentication, multi-factor prompts or CAPTCHA, and does not accept a portal’s terms on your behalf. After submission it records the confirmation number, the receipt and the file hashes.
Under the hood
Twelve specialised agents, each with a stated limit
In the standard deployment every one runs as an explainable rule engine on your own server and no content leaves it. Each publishes what it may write and what it is not permitted to do. The limits below are enforced in code, not policy.
Polls each enabled source connector and records what was seen, when, and from which authority.
Reads and records only. Cannot advance an opportunity beyond Monitoring.Normalises ingested notices, detects duplicates and related notices, preserves prior versions.
Never deletes a historical record. Suspected duplicates are marked for human confirmation.Compares an opportunity against the capability profile and returns an explainable classification with per-factor reasoning.
Advisory. Never asserts legal eligibility; missing information yields “insufficient information”, not a pass.Scores twenty-one weighted criteria, states unresolved assumptions and recommends a course of action.
Recommends only. The binding decision is recorded by an authorised Executive Approver.Generates the capture plan skeleton: win themes, discriminators, gaps, risks, milestones, gates.
Every generated item starts unreviewed and can be accepted, edited, rejected or regenerated.Extracts requirements with a citation to the exact page and section, and flags low-confidence extractions.
Never invents a requirement. Treats document text strictly as data, never as instructions.Diffs a revised solicitation against the prior version, classifies each change and traces the impact onto your work.
Never replaces the original. Both versions are retained and addressable.Assembles a draft section from approved evidence, citing every source and listing assumptions and unsupported claims.
Output is always draft. Where no approved evidence exists it writes an explicit evidence requirement instead of prose.Finds the approved, in-date, jurisdiction-permitted evidence relevant to a requirement and reports what is missing.
Read-only. Never returns expired or superseded material as usable.Checks the matrix for unresolved mandatories, unevidenced claims, expired evidence and missing owners.
Reports findings. Cannot itself set a response to compliant.Builds the package: file set, required filenames, hashes, checklist, deadline with time zone, unresolved exceptions.
Prepares to “Ready for Authorized Submission” and stops. Cannot perform the binding submission.Compares the outcome against the pre-submission assessment and records what should change.
Suggests weighting changes; an administrator applies them.Control
Ten roles. Nothing implicit.
Permissions are additive per role and the interface hides what a role cannot use, but hiding a control is never the only protection. The server refuses the request independently.
Only one role can bind you
The Executive Approver is the only role that can decide a gate, and only within a recorded approval limit. An approver whose limit is below the value at risk is refused and told to escalate. Where an approver has two-factor enabled, it is re-verified at the moment of decision, not merely at sign-in.
Writing is not approving
Technical, commercial and legal contributors write and review. Capture and proposal managers own the pursuit and the response. None of them can approve their own work through a gate, and every approval records what the approver was actually shown.
Teaming without exposure
An external partner account sees only the opportunities, documents and tasks explicitly shared with it, never the pipeline, the capability profile or any other pursuit. Sharing is blocked until an NDA is recorded as executed and sanctions screening is clear. Export-controlled material is never shareable.
The boundary
What it will never do
Every one of these is a deliberate refusal, enforced in the product rather than promised in a contract. They are the reason the system can be trusted with a pursuit at all. A tool that could quietly sign a certification would not be usable in defence.
The preferred end state is a package marked Ready for Authorized Submission. What happens after that is a human decision, recorded as one.
- Declare that your company is legally eligible for a procurement
- Make a final export-control, sanctions or security-clearance determination
- Invent corporate evidence, certifications, test results or production capacity
- Invent a product capability you have not recorded
- Set or approve final pricing without an authorised approval
- Sign a certification or make a legal representation
- Accept contract terms on your behalf
- Submit a binding tender without an authorised approval gate
- Bypass portal authentication, multi-factor prompts, CAPTCHA or portal terms
- Present a fabricated tender number, budget, deadline or requirement as real
- Claim an automated function is operational when only the interface exists
The platform layer
Four public platforms feed one private workspace
Lurker explains the operating environment. Defence News explains what happened. Procurement shows what is currently open. The Programme Tracker shows where a programme is going. Capture Workspace manages what you are pursuing, whether you should bid, and what must be completed to submit a compliant response.
Public, and free to read
The four information platforms are open. They are how the market sees Iron Shield, and how a supplier keeps a picture of the environment without signing anything. See the platform layer →
Private, and yours alone
Capture Workspace is a subscription with your own tenant. Your pipeline, capability profile, evidence and pursuits are visible only to the people you invite. Reading another organisation’s record returns not-found, so the existence of other tenants’ data cannot be inferred. How it is isolated →
Questions
Frequently asked
No. It prepares a package to a status called Ready for Authorized Submission and stops. An authorised executive then approves, returns or rejects it, and a person performs the submission. The system does not bypass portal authentication, multi-factor prompts or CAPTCHA.
No. It compares a solicitation against your recorded profile and flags potential participation barriers: a missing clearance, an unverified registration, an unconfirmed market access. Those are prompts for human determination. The system never states that a company is legally eligible.
In the standard deployment the twelve agents run as explainable rule engines on your own server and no content leaves it. Model-assisted drafting is an optional adapter you enable deliberately, and when enabled the tender text is sanitised and fenced before it is sent.
Tender documents are treated as data, never as instructions. Every externally sourced document is scanned for nine families of instruction-injection pattern plus hidden and zero-width characters. Anything detected is neutralised in place, flagged and raised as an alert rather than silently removed.
The revised document is stored as a new version. The original is never replaced. The two are compared, the deadline change is raised as a critical alert, a task is created for the capture owner, and the acknowledgement is recorded and shown on the authorisation screen.
Yes. External partner accounts see only the opportunities, documents and tasks explicitly shared with them, never the pipeline, the capability profile or any other pursuit. Sharing is blocked until an NDA is recorded as executed and sanctions screening is clear, and export-controlled material is never shareable.
Request access from the workspace sign-in page. Registration creates your organisation and the credential you choose, and an Iron Shield administrator reviews the request before access is granted. The page is public, the workspace is not. Once approved you administer your own organisation and invite your team under the ten defined roles.
Yes. The product is multi-tenant from the first record. Every business record carries an organisation identifier and every query is scoped through it, at the data layer rather than the interface. Reading another organisation’s record returns not-found.
Use of this product is subject to the Capture Workspace Disclaimer, the Terms & Conditions and the Privacy Policy. The workspace is not authorised for government-classified information.