Data and artificial intelligence (AI), an increasingly common phenomenon that is now also being used more frequently in construction. AI can also be used during the tender phase. Currently, many bid and tender managers still walk out with folders full of printed tender documents with sticky notes and highlighted texts. This is going to change.
Human and machine will increasingly work together and there will be a ‘digitization revolution’ in the coming years. Ballast Nedam Zuid likes to be ahead of the game and has started to leverage AI in responding to tenders using Brainial’s software.
If we take a closer look at the process of responding to tenders it is full of repetitive tasks and manual work. This can be smartly automated and digitized using AI. After the tender documents are received, they are uploaded into Brainial’s software. Automatically all information is extracted from the various documents, categorized and presented in a proper way.
Think of the planning, criteria and documents to be delivered. All information is also made intelligently searchable. Ballast Nedam Zuid has configured and trained the system to detect specific points of attention and risks. These functionalities save a lot of time and an initial decision can be made within a few minutes whether or not to submit a tender. Because both humans and machines read through the tender documents, less information is overlooked which leads to the reduction of failure costs.
Within the construction industry there are all kinds of standardized formats of construction information, technical specifications and contract forms. The high variety of these types of documents and the fact that they are often only provided in PDF means that contractors spend a lot of time interpreting, analyzing and getting to the bottom of the content.
In addition, it is not always easy to quickly relate information to each other. Many of the related information are described in documents from the appendices, the guidance, drawings or in the memorandum of information. By using AI, all information is related to each other and neatly put together. This creates an integral overview of the work, allows the contract documents to be fathomed more quickly and saves a lot of time.
"Together with Brainial, we have created smart functionalities to automatically extract metadata from documents, to automatically place documents including metadata in the right place in the Document Management System. Based on an initial estimate, this functionality alone will result in time savings of 75% per tender and it will increase the quality and data integrity of the internal data household. But perhaps the most important benefit is that it leads to higher employee satisfaction.”
"The results of the collaboration between Ballast Nedam Zuid and Brainial are promising so far. Looking to the future, even greater leaps can be made through the use of machine learning. After all, the system is getting smarter by usage. Information can be arranged automatically, and also actions, tasks and risks can be predicted automatically.”
Ballast Nedam Zuid and Brainial are positively looking forward to the future to make responding to tenders more efficient, reduce the failure costs and increase the quality of the responses.
