How Brainial became part of Breedweer’s tender process — and its team

You know software has truly been adopted when a team no longer sees it as a tool, but almost as an extra colleague. At facility services provider Breedweer, Brainial has even been given a name of its own: ‘Barry’. Barry is involved in every tender, helps the team retrieve relevant knowledge from previous bids and makes it much faster to get a strong first draft down on paper. As a result, Breedweer can work on more tenders at the same time and spend more time on the part that ultimately makes the difference.

So how did Brainial become such an established part of Breedweer’s tender process, and what does ‘Barry’ do for the team today? You can read all about it in this case

The arrival of AI shook things up
‍Facility services provider Breedweer was founded several decades ago in the neighbourhood of the same name in Heemskerk. The company has grown enormously in a relatively short period of time and has now been named one of the Netherlands’ Top 250 fastest-growing companies for the seventh year in a row. As Breedweer has grown, it has increasingly competed for larger contracts through tenders.

“We noticed that many tenders contained the same quality-related questions, which meant we often had to manually search through previous bids,” says commercial employee Jeffrey La Rooij. The arrival of AI got the team thinking. “Couldn’t this process be made much more efficient? That’s ultimately how we came across Brainial,” Jeffrey explains. Because although Breedweer had built up a wealth of tender knowledge over the years, the way that knowledge was used and reused was still a highly manual process.

Manually searching for quality requirements
Because many tender requests contained similar quality-related questions, the team would often look back at previously written texts when working on a new tender. “That could be quite a search,” Jeffrey explains. “We used to work from a drive in the cloud. Each tender had several folders and documents: the tender documents, a calculation and a folder containing texts and evaluations.”

While writing, Jeffrey and his team would have an old tender open on one screen and a blank Word document on the other. “Not to copy sections word for word, but to use ideas and approaches from previous tenders in a new proposal. Which texts do you use? Which ones received good feedback, and which didn’t? That could easily take several hours — or sometimes even days.”

The world sped up, but the tender process lagged behind
As working processes became smarter and faster, the manual tender process increasingly started to feel out of step. “If AI tools can make everything so much faster, why was our tender process still mainly manual? Surely this could be made much more efficient, we thought.” That is how the company eventually found Brainial. “The collaboration felt good right from the start,” Jeffrey says. “We received a warm welcome and there was an immediate fit.”

During the onboarding, Jeffrey and his colleagues learned how our software works, which features are available and, above all, how to ask the right questions. “The input you put into Brainial has to be good enough to get the output you want. We were very aware of that.” That’s why the team deliberately spent a lot of time during the implementation phase setting up and filling the environment properly. “We immediately reaped the benefits,” Jeffrey says. “In fact, we won the very first tender we worked on with Brainial.”

Brainial feels like a colleague
‍The more Breedweer worked with Brainial, the more naturally the platform became part of its tender process. So naturally, in fact, that Brainial eventually got a name of its own. “Barry came up as a joke one day,” Jeffrey says. “But by now we write texts with Barry, get help from Barry and pretty much everyone knows who Barry is. He’s just about the only one who doesn’t join us for Friday afternoon drinks,” Jeffrey jokes.

The fact that our software has now been given its own name says a lot about how deeply Brainial has become embedded in Breedweer’s way of working. “We don’t just open the software when we need to quickly look something up. Barry is involved in every tender we work on nowadays. It really feels like an extra colleague who thinks along with us, retrieves information and helps us get to a strong first draft faster,” Jeffrey explains.

What would Barry say?
‍Within Brainial, the team extracts the main points of attention from tender requests and uses a fixed set of questions to quickly determine whether a tender is interesting enough to pursue further. “Thanks to Barry, we can see incredibly quickly whether a tender is worth our time. The time we used to spend figuring all of this out can now be invested in developing and improving the tenders we actually give a ‘go’.” After that, it is up to Jeffrey to start writing.

“Where I used to spend days searching, comparing and building a first version, we can now get a first draft down on paper much faster.” As a result, Breedweer can now handle many more tenders at the same time. “I upload the documents and let Brainial write an initial draft. Of course, every tender still requires a tailored approach, but in some cases that first version is already so strong that we can use it with relatively few changes,” Jeffrey says.

Give your tender team a Barry
If Jeffrey had to choose tender software again today, he would not need much time to think about it. “We’re extremely happy with our ‘new colleague’. We can work on more tenders at the same time, develop an initial draft faster and spend our time on the things that actually help us win a tender,” he concludes. Want to know where to focus your attention faster, just like Breedweer? Barry... Uh, Brainial brings your tender documents, previous tender knowledge and evaluations together in one environment.

That means you can determine more quickly whether a tender is worth pursuing, retrieve relevant knowledge from previous bids much faster and build a strong first draft sooner. Book a demo and discover how Brainial frees up time for the part of your tender where you can truly make the difference.

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