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Lafarge is the world’s largest cement manufacturer, and specializes in cement, construction aggregates, and concrete.
Yet their position as the industry’s leader created a big problem — they received more tender documents than they could process.
“We manually reviewed each tender we received, but we just didn’t have enough people who were qualified or experienced enough to go through those documents,” explained Wil Mora at Lafarge.
Lafarge had staff capable of doing this work, but they were overburdened, they sometimes had to rush through their work to meet the incoming volume, and were often playing catch up on the tenders in their queue.
“We knew what we had to do, but we didn’t have enough people to do all the important things on a routine basis,” said Wil. “Everything was on a case-by-case basis, or because of a customer request — and it just wasn’t as good as it could have been.”
First, Lafarge tried to solve this problem by shortcutting it.
They typically worked with the owner of the property, the developer, and the general contractor, who were all different organizations. The full tender documents would come from the owner, but Lafarge’s point of contact might be the developer or the general contractor.
“We tried asking our point of contact to give us specific requirements for the job,” said Wil. “And then we’d let them know we didn’t do a full review of the tender documents, and we’d just do what they specifically requested.”
This process worked when their point of contact knew a lot about the job and was very experienced. Yet it was inconsistent, and didn’t give Lafarge confidence they knew about all of the project’s potential risks.
Next, Lafarge tried to solve this problem by adding more people to their tender review process.
“We were just looking through the different departments and finding people that might be able to take on the role,” said Wil. “None of them were hired for this work, but they had the technical background and education, and they were high performers, so we moved them up.”
Yet this didn’t work either, for a few reasons:
Lafarge had begun to adopt AI tools in other departments — like logistics — to automate internal reporting and efficient delivery to their customers.
“We already had some good programs and platforms we were trying out,” said Wil. “We had reports that used to take a whole day to produce, but with AI we were now making them in minutes. So we started to think about how many other things we could start doing with AI to save time.”
They began to look for AI tools that could solve their tender review problems.
They found and evaluated four tools, but chose Provision for a few reasons:
“Provision gave us features that none of the other tools offered — like exporting to multiple formats, and being able to analyze images and drawings,” said Wil. “Ultimately it was the only tool we looked at that really did what it said it did, and was being used by big industry players.”
Lafarge automated a large amount of their tender review process using Provision. This has significantly reduced how much time their staff spends reviewing and revising documents, and helped them perform this work more consistently, and at a higher quality.
With Provision, Lafarge:
Lafarge has run over 150 projects through Provision. They have already generated significant results, and believe Provision can deliver some even bigger wins in the future.
These current and projected outcomes include:
As Wil Mora at Lafarge summarizes:
“Provision is an innovative platform that’s efficient and user-friendly, and it’s improved our day-to-day work. It could save your team a lot of time on manual work — so they can focus on more important things like mitigating the risks they identified, collaborating with your customers, and finding ways to offer more value to every project.”