How Edrak reduced tender preparation from three days to four hours

The company

The company is a mid-sized construction contractor delivering commercial and infrastructure projects across Saudi Arabia.

Its tendering team reviews opportunities from government entities, developers and main contractors. Each tender can contain hundreds of pages distributed across instructions, technical specifications, bills of quantities, drawings, contractual conditions and subsequent addenda.

The company had the technical capability to compete for more projects. Its constraint was the time required to understand each opportunity before estimators and commercial leaders could make an informed bid decision.

Every tender began with days of document work

When a new tender arrived, the team first had to determine what it contained.

Documents were downloaded from procurement portals and distributed across folders. Tendering specialists read through them manually, searching for submission requirements, deadlines, contractual obligations and technical conditions.

They then had to assemble the information required by estimators, engineers, procurement and management.

Before pricing could begin, the team needed to establish:

• The complete scope of work
• Mandatory submission documents
• Commercial and technical evaluation criteria
• Bond, insurance and warranty requirements
• Key contractual risks
• Required materials and subcontracted packages
• Clarification deadlines and submission dates
• Changes introduced through tender addenda
• Items requiring input from another department

The work was repetitive, but missing one requirement could make the entire submission non-compliant.

As deadlines approached, senior employees frequently returned to the original documents to verify information that had already been reviewed. Important requirements were sometimes discovered only during the final submission check, forcing the team to revise work under pressure.

Starting with tender preparation

The company deployed Atlas around the work that happened immediately after a tender was received.

Foundry connected the company’s tender archive, approved templates, project credentials, policies and previous submissions. The company then defined the information and approvals required for a tender to move through its internal process.

When a new opportunity arrived, the tender documents were added to an Atlas mission room.

Atlas read the full document set, classified each file and created a structured view of the opportunity. It identified the client, project scope, submission deadline, required deliverables and the departments that needed to contribute.

Atlas prepared the information required for employees to decide whether the company should bid.

From hundreds of pages to a review-ready workspace

Atlas organized each tender into a consistent workflow.

It extracted and structured:

• The project scope and principal work packages
• Eligibility and prequalification requirements
• Technical and commercial submission requirements
• Important dates and clarification windows
• Required forms, certificates and declarations
• Payment terms, penalties, bonds and warranties
• Evaluation criteria and mandatory conditions
• Material quantities and procurement packages
• Contractual clauses requiring specialist review

Every extracted requirement remained linked to its original page and document. Employees could move from a summary directly to the source.

Atlas then compared the requirements against the company’s available information.

Existing project credentials, company documents and approved responses were retrieved from previous submissions held in Foundry. Missing information was assigned to the relevant owner, with the specific tender requirement and deadline attached.

Instead of coordinating through separate email threads and spreadsheets, commercial, engineering, procurement and legal teams worked through one controlled mission room.

Preparing the first draft

Once the tender had been structured, Atlas prepared the first version of the submission.

It populated approved company information, organized relevant project experience and drafted responses based on the tender requirements and the company’s source material.

Atlas also created:

• A tender compliance matrix
• A list of required submission documents
• A departmental responsibility schedule
• A clarification register
• A commercial and contractual risk summary
• An initial technical-response structure
• A final submission checklist

The team received a complete starting point with the underlying evidence already attached.

Commercial judgment remained with the company

Tender preparation involves decisions that carry commercial consequence, so Atlas was configured to stop at defined approval points.

Employees remained responsible for:

• Deciding whether to bid
• Confirming the proposed technical approach
• Selecting suppliers and subcontractors
• Building and approving the price
• Accepting contractual risk
• Approving deviations and clarifications
• Authorizing the final submission

Atlas handled document review, requirement extraction, information retrieval, first-draft preparation and internal coordination.

Where tender language was unclear or conflicting, Atlas flagged the issue instead of making an assumption. The responsible employee could review the relevant clauses, provide a decision and return the workflow to progress.

Every contribution, edit and approval was recorded.

This allowed the company to accelerate preparation without weakening accountability for the commitments made in its bid.

Reducing three days of preparation to four hours

The company tested Atlas on previously completed tenders before introducing it into live opportunities.

The tendering team compared Atlas’s output with the original document review and checked whether material requirements could be traced to the correct sources.

Following validation, Atlas was deployed across selected live tenders. The company recorded:

• Tender preparation reduced from three working days to four hours
• An 83% reduction in time spent reading, classifying and organizing tender documents
• 70% fewer requirements identified during final submission checks, because obligations were surfaced earlier
• Faster assignment of work across commercial, technical, procurement and legal teams
• A consistent compliance structure across different clients and tender formats
• 100% employee approval retained for pricing, contractual commitments and final submission

The four-hour figure represented the time required to produce a structured, review-ready tender workspace. It did not include technical design, estimation, supplier negotiations or management approval.

Atlas accelerated the preparation surrounding those activities.

More time to decide where the company can win

The faster process allowed the commercial team to evaluate opportunities sooner.

Management could review the scope, strategic fit, delivery requirements and contractual exposure before committing substantial resources to the bid.

Estimators received structured information earlier. Procurement could identify supplier packages without waiting for the entire document review to finish. Legal teams were brought in for specific clauses rather than being asked to examine the full tender.

When the company chose not to bid, it reached that conclusion earlier and with clearer evidence. When it proceeded, the contributing teams had more time to improve the submission.

Building on every submission

Tender knowledge had previously been dispersed across old folders, employee inboxes and individual experience.

Foundry retained approved answers, project credentials, clarifications and review decisions as reusable company knowledge.

When a future tender contained a similar requirement, Atlas could retrieve the relevant material, show where it had been used before and present it for employee review.

The company did not have to reconstruct its institutional knowledge for every new opportunity.

Over time, each completed tender made the next one easier to prepare, without allowing outdated information to be reused without approval.

Expanding across the commercial process

Following the initial deployment, the company began extending Atlas into related workflows:

• Bid and no-bid assessment
• Prequalification submissions
• Supplier quotation analysis
• Contract-risk review
• Tender clarification management
• Handover from tendering to project delivery
• Variation and claims-document preparation

Each workflow follows the same operating model: Atlas completes the repetitive document and coordination work, while employees retain control over the technical, commercial and contractual decisions.

The outcome

The company needed its tender documents to become structured work.

Atlas and Foundry reduced tender preparation from three days to four hours, gave specialists more time to improve the bid and kept every consequential decision with the people accountable for delivering it.