How McCoy & Partners Transformed Its Tender Process with Brainial

From Three Weeks to Two Days: How McCoy & Partners Transformed Its Tender Process with Brainial

Jacques Scheutjens knows exactly what happens when a 400-page tender lands on his desk. The search begins: old emails, shared folders and the collective memory of colleagues. As Sales & Marketing Manager at McCoy & Partners, an SAP implementation partner with around 350 employees in the Netherlands, he's experienced it firsthand.  

The company completes eight to ten tenders each year projects that can run for more than a year and involve dozens of people over several months. There had to be a better way. In this customer story, Jacques explains how McCoy & Partners reduced the time needed to complete tender questionnaires from three weeks to just two days with Brainial.

Days of work before you could even get started

Before adopting Brainial, the entire tender process was manual. Every new tender meant starting the search all over again. "You just had to hope you could find the right colleague who still remembered, or that the documents were somewhere you could retrieve them," Jacques says. With tenders containing hundreds or even thousands of questions, that search alone could take days. Large tenders often consist of dozens of separate documents, where the same requirement may be phrased differently in different places. Contradictions like these are almost impossible to spot through manual review.

McCoy & Partners wasn't actively looking for a new solution. But when Brainial approached them and demonstrated the platform, they immediately saw the difference. Twenty qualification questions were answered automatically based on the uploaded tender documents. What previously took days now took minutes. For Jacques, that was all the proof he needed. "Ever since we saw Brainial during the demo, I haven't looked at any alternatives," he says. "And I don't feel the need to."

From qualification to completed questionnaires in two days

Today, McCoy & Partners uses Brainial from the moment a tender arrives. The first question is always: Is this opportunity worth pursuing? To answer that, the team works with a standard set of around twenty qualification questions:

• Is there a budget?

• Does the scope fit our business?

• Is the market relevant?

Previously, someone had to manually work through stacks of documents to answer those questions. Now Brainial provides the answers instantly based on the uploaded documentation. The biggest improvement comes from the questionnaire functionality. For tenders containing dozens or even hundreds of questions, McCoy & Partners exports the questionnaire to Excel and uploads it into Brainial.

Brainial then matches each question with answers from previous tenders. "We used to spend three weeks completing 80% of the questionnaire," Jacques says. "Now we do it in two days."

Confidence grows with every tender

The first time the team used Brainial, there was naturally some scepticism. Did the platform really pick up this detail? Are these answers actually correct? "The more you work with it, the more you see that Brainial gives the right answers about 90% of the time and with the right context. The platform does the heavy lifting, but you still decide what ultimately gets submitted," Jacques says. He no longer checks all twenty qualification questions manually. "'Good enough' is actually an understatement. They're simply good."

Source references play an important role in building that confidence. Team members can immediately see where an answer comes from: which previous tender and in what context. Sometimes Brainial generates an answer without a source reference for example, when no comparable precedent exists in the knowledge base. The platform clearly indicates this as well, allowing the team to recognise when additional manual review is needed.

Less hassle, more focus

For Jacques, the biggest change is the way the team now approaches tenders. "A bid is a lot of work and a lot of hassle," he says. "Many colleagues are relieved that Brainial now supports them." Starting a tender feels much less daunting because the preparation phase requires far less effort.

The time previously spent searching through documentation and retrieving old answers is now invested in writing stronger proposals. More time for content. More time for what truly differentiates a winning bid. Jacques also doesn't see Brainial as a finished product. Every month brings new functionality, and every month the team discovers another way to improve its tender process.

Ready to move from tender to answers faster?

Want to work the way Jacques and his team do today? Book a demo and experience what Brainial can do for your tender process.

If Brainial's target audience is primarily UK-based, I can also localise this into UK English (e.g. tender documents, bid team, programme, whilst, organisation, etc.) for an even more native feel.

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