Jorritsma Bouw cut their tender prep time with Brainial
Analysing a 50-page selection guideline is quite a task. It can take hours of your precious time, but it’s a crucial step in creating a strong tender. For Hermien Terwisscha van Scheltinga, Prequalification Coordinator at Jorritsma Bouw, that hours-long process became a quick and easy task that now takes just 2 minutes.
Thanks to Brainial, that means less time buried in documents, and more time to sharpen their strategy, write stronger proposals and catch contradictions before anything is submitted. In this article, you’ll discover why Jorritsma Bouw chose Brainial, and how tender preparation became faster, smarter and a lot more fun.
About Jorritsma Bouw
Founded in 1880 by Johannes Jorritsma in a canal house in Bolsward, Jorritsma Bouw has grown into one of the largest construction companies in the North of the Netherlands. With around 250 employees and an annual turnover of over 100 million euros, they operate across commercial construction, residential building and industrial projects - from small renovations to large-scale, technically complex builds. Five generations in, they're still family-owned and still building.
Like a lot of construction companies, tenders are a core part of how Jorritsma gets their projects. The team handles the full cycle of the tender process: from prequalification responses through to final submissions, across a wide variety of project types and clients. That range is exactly what makes the process demanding: every tender requires a tailored approach, careful document analysis and tight coordination between disciplines.
So when that first analysis step suddenly takes minutes instead of hours, it saves the team a huge amount of time. How efficiently and accurately the team handles each tender has a direct impact on which ones they win.
“The demo was enough to convince me”
Chris Wesselink, Director of Procurement and Partnerships, had been looking for ways to bring AI into Jorritsma's workflow for some time. In April, he sat in on a Brainial demo and that was enough to convince him to make the switch to our platform. "The founders of Brainial have deep domain knowledge. They understand how we think and how we work. One of them has a background in construction. Those facts combined, make Brainial the best partner to elevate our bid process."
The onboarding was structured and hands-on: four working sessions in which the core team from Jorritsma was taught how the platform works, by our people. No lengthy rollout, no IT project that took months - within a short period of time, Hermien, Chris and the bid team were using Brainial on live tenders.
A different (yet better) way of working
The difference with their old way of working showed immediately. Where Hermien previously had to work through extensive selection guidelines page by page, Brainial now surfaces the relevant information directly. "Thanks to Brainial's analysis capabilities, I can now get a clear overview of a 50-page selection guideline within five minutes."
That's not just a time gain, it completely changed how the team prepares for a bid. Instead of spending hours (or sometimes even a full day) on reading and structuring documents before a single word was written, the team can now move straight to the part that actually requires their expertise. The analysis is a starting point, not a bottleneck that's keeping their team hostage.
Besides being able to work a lot faster, they also benefit from the fact that our tool flags inconsistencies. When two parts of a document contain conflicting information, Brainial points it out. For example: when asked about technical competencies for two specific lots, the tool identifies two conflicting answers in different parts of the same document. Those kinds of contradictions are easy to miss when you're reading manually and under time pressure. Hermien now takes those findings to the formal notice of clarification, reducing risk before a single proposal is submitted. Chris adds: "Brainial doesn't make up answers. If the information isn't in the documents, nothing appears. We can also validate answers ourselves."
From analysis to draft in a whip
Besides making the analysis a lot faster, the team also uses Brainial to write stronger selection texts in less time. The first step in any tender is a strong prequalification response getting invited to submit a price offer. Hermien tailors these texts carefully to the client's specific wishes and requirements. She knows which references work best for an education-sector client versus an industrial one, and which formulations land. Finding the right material from previous tenders used to mean digging through folders and old documents, now it's a search query that delivers in seconds.
Chris: "With less effort, we gain more insight. We now reach a draft we can share internally much faster. Brainial also learns from the feedback we receive from clients. That feedback loop, structured into the platform, means the quality of our proposals improves even more over time.”
What's next?
The next step for the bid team at Jorritsma is expanding access. The current core team, including a tender writer, a company lawyer, a manager of calculation and engineering, and several project managers, will soon be joined by engineers and calculators. Because the full specification is in Brainial, they'll be able to look up project details themselves: who is responsible for what, what was agreed and what's still open.
Chris expects to have 60 tenders in Brainial within a year. Hermien puts it plainly: "We now have more time to create even better plans." And that time matters. It gives the team space to make sharper choices, build proposals that fit the client more closely, and turn good plans into ones that are more likely to win.
The short version
Jorritsma Bouw reduced the time it takes to get a clear overview of tender documents from hours to minutes. They flag contradictions before submitting a proposal and write stronger proposals in less time. And they're building a growing library of tender knowledge that their whole team can draw from.
That's what happens when a team stops fighting their tools and starts working with one that actually fits. Want the same for your team? Book a demo with Brainial
