Twenty-two electricians working as a subcontractor to main contractors across Flanders. Their bottleneck was never the work — it was counting symbols on layout sheets.
A tender invitation arrives on Friday and closes Tuesday. Pricing it means counting every socket, switch, luminaire, data point and distribution board across a dozen layout sheets, then estimating the cable runs between them. Miscount by thirty devices and the margin is gone before the first cable is pulled.
Electrical sheets are tagged on upload and read page by page. Joffers returns the device schedule as line items — counts per type, per floor — with the installation labor attached to each one from the Maes price book rather than a rule of thumb.
Symbols that clash with a hatch, or legends that only appear on sheet 1, are the rows that get flagged. The estimator opens the page preview next to the flagged row, confirms the count, and moves on. What used to be a Saturday is now the hour before lunch.
“We used to pick which tenders were worth the counting. Now we price all of them and pick on merit.”
Three times the tender volume, unchanged headcount, and a hit rate that improved simply because quotes now arrive early rather than at the deadline. Main contractors get a device-level breakdown they can check, which has cut the back-and-forth before award to roughly one email.
Exported from Joffers · figures illustrative