With only a few days left in the year, we present to you the Brainial product highlights of 2021. Looking back from a product development perspective, it has been a great year with lots of new features. We would like to highlight a few of the best features that will help you spend less time on responding to tenders, reduce the failure cost and boost your win rate.
More data and information is now circulated than at any other time in history. Tenders are getting larger and contain more information than ever before. At Brainial, we find that our customers receive an average of 100 to 150 documents per tender, with some peaking at over 2,000 documents per tender. Even after reading or scanning the documents, it’s still hard to find the information you are looking for. Ctrl-F is very often used, but this requires knowing in which document to look, which is not an obvious task in itself.
Using Brainial, users can instantly find the information they want in all tender documents by using our “Smart Search” (vector search) or exact search feature. Search results can be filtered on attributes such as categories, documents, document types, tags, tasks, since the Brainial product categorizes, labels, and classifies all tender data during the initial analysis. Smart Search can be used within a tender to find information quickly. Using Smart Search, it is even possible to find information in your historical tender information, including response documents, customer reference descriptions, and customer reviews and feedback. This feature makes the manual creation of a tender database or tender library a thing of the past. Stop wasting time and stop bothering your colleagues by asking where to find information.
Missing a risk or making the wrong bid decision can have a severe impact on profitability. Brainial automatically reads, extracts, and presents all the key elements. The Bid Analyzer identifies and ranks all your company-specific points of attention & risks, which are all presented in one integrated overview. Within a few minutes of analysis by the Brainial product, a bid / no-bid decision tailored to your organization can be made. This is a huge time saver and helps you with focussing on the right documents to read thoroughly, and automates the bid qualification process.
When a tender is received, all documents can be dragged and dropped into the Brainial solution at once. The analysis of the documents takes only a few minutes and all relevant information is extracted from the documents. The Documents Insights feature provides an overview of all documents within one tender, together with the metadata and DMS folders predicted by the system. The metadata is automatically extracted by the Brainial product and can be validated or corrected, and the system keeps track of which documents have been processed, ensuring that nothing is overlooked and 100% accuracy can be achieved. When metadata is corrected, a sneak peek of the document can be viewed for validation at the push of a button. Documents can be selected and sent to the DMS where they are automatically placed in the right folder including the right metadata placed. We have developed additional useful features such as filtering and searching for documents, bulk editing, and bulk integration with the DMS. We also show the original folder structure in which the documents were delivered, and you can easily switch to the folder structure of your organization. All in all, the Documents Insights feature will make many Bid and Tender Managers happy.
The Brainial solution digitizes technical tender specifications and contract forms and automatically detects whether they are formatted according to construction standards such as STABU or RAW or whether they are organization-specific custom formats. The user-friendly interface shows the dynamic or standardized layout of the document on the left side of the screen, making navigation easy, and creating an instant overview of the structure of the specifications. Depending on the type of document, we can show multiple formats such as a requirements tree but also a format based on the chapters of the document. These layouts make it very easy to navigate through the document. Selections make it possible to show information combined on the screen. For specific layouts, we have developed specific functionalities. For example, for UAV-GC documents we have made it possible to easily click through from parent to subordinate requirement or vice versa, and to display them together on the screen. Information from the documents is easily searchable in its entirety or by selection. Some tenders contain multiple specification documents and we have made it possible to show them separately or together.
In many cases, contractors work with subcontractors. These subcontractors are hired to take care of a subsection of the work. The general contractor asks the subcontractors to provide a quote for this subsection. Currently, all tender documents are often shared with a subcontractor, or documents are manually prepared to describe the specific work for which the subcontractor may submit a price quote. Since the relevant information comes not only from technical specifications documents but also from drawings and attachments, it is quite a task to put it all together by the main contractor or subcontractor. Brainial can automatically bundle all relevant information. It is also possible to add tender items/requirements or other tender information and documents to a so-called marked set. The information and context are automatically bundled in one document where the relevant information is highlighted. This marked set can be downloaded and shared with subcontractors, making it clear what is expected from the subcontractor, and which is the most relevant information. This same functionality can be used to share relevant parts of a tender with an internal or external specialist.
Many tender procedures include rounds of clarifications where bidding organizations can ask questions of the contracting authority. Often the answers to all questions are provided in a combined document to all bidding organizations. Our customers regularly complain to us about the time-consuming exercise to match the questions and answers to the respective content within the tender documents. Brainial removes much of the manual work by matching the questions and answers that relate to the tender documents and drawings directly to the specific tender document item(s) and drawings or other attachments. This creates an instant overview and it is immediately clear whether any adjustments apply to each technical specification item.
We won’t stop here and we have great ideas for 2022. Please stay tuned, and we will keep you updated on our plans. We would like to thank our customers and partners for sharing their ideas and feedback with us. We will continue to jointly envision and develop useful functionalities to save time, reduce failure costs, and ultimately increase quality and odds of winning. It helps us to create the most intelligent and trusted tender assistant to get better proposals, faster.
Cheers to the New Year! Wishing you a Happy Holiday season from the team at Brainial.
