Renotec restores and renovates buildings, monuments and art works. They do so with expert knowledge of crafts and by using innovative technologies. All employees are specialised professionals. Their talent, safety and wellbeing are the building blocks of any project.
800 employees, 120 project leaders, 32 years of experience … The figures are clear. Renotec Group is a large company with an impressive project portfolio. Always and everywhere, Renotec opts for quality and efficiency. For the automation of creative and administrative processes, Renotec has worked with Catena Company for many years.
Tendering for major renovation works is typically done through public tenders. These tenders often request a lot of information. It’s not just about making a price quotation. Technical sheets of the materials used should also be included, as well as all kinds of certificates, CVs of employees, information about the supervising architect and site supervisors, etc. You’ll understand that a quotation soon becomes a huge project file, containing documents and information from various sources, which have to be combined in a variety of formats.
In addition, Renotec wants to make its offers as attractive as possible in its own house style. An offer with a nice layout, in which all the information can be found quickly and transparently, will be more easily remembered than a dull and hard-to-read file.
Initially, the quotation process took place entirely in Word. The different sources were merged manually, a process Christine Engels, Calculator Renotec, wanted to automate. One of the options Renotec had was Word, which would be a purely administrative solution. This programme would not, however, give the documents the desired look.
Renotec already knew that creative work can be done in Adobe InDesign to create attractive documents. In various processes (such as, for example, the documentation of stained glass repairs)
InDesign was already being used. Using InDesign in a more administrative context was new to Renotec, but Christine was soon convinced that InDesign is the way to go.
The automation of our quotation process was a project of limited scope, but it delivered us comparatively large profits. Initially, we thought mainly about the obvious things like time savings and fewer errors. The fact that our document management became more centralised and that the use of InDesign did allow us to make our quotations very attractive are perks we are very happy with.
The great advantage of InDesign – and by extension all Adobe programmes – is that a lot can be automated with good scripting. And this is exactly a great plus of Catena Company. A script was written aimed at retrieving all the necessary documents in the desired order and generating a nice document with them.
In a dropdown list, the user chooses which documents to include in the file and once the file is complete, a table of contents is automatically created. If desired, the layout and content can still be adjusted manually, but the generation of the InDesign document only takes a few seconds. Then it can be easily exported to a PDF.
That this automation resulted in major time savings goes without saying. The automation of the process, also streamlined the process. Input documents are now managed centrally. This is not just an advantage for employees who have to make offers, but for anyone who needs these documents. Furthermore, far fewer errors tend to occur in these tenders. To work faster we often used to start from another offer, obviously at the risk of taking over irrelevant or erroneous information. The multitude of different versions of quotations and the use of outdated templates is definitely a thing of the past.
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