North America Construction (1993) Ltd. / NAC Constructors Ltd. (NAC) is a multi-discipline, selfperforming general contractor in Moriston, Ontario that works on large heavy industrial construction projects. Recently, they overcame a large challenge — manual contract review. For many years, NAC managed the processing of over 40 RFTs annually through a hands-on-review process. Although this approach ensured a thorough examination of each contract it was extremely time consuming. As contract language became more complicated and review timelines grew tighter they realized a change in process was needed.
Each contract could contain dozens or hundreds of risk items, and NAC’s estimating team didn’t have the time to find and push back on every unfavorable term.
Reconciling differences between a contract’s General and Supplementary Conditions were tedious and hard to do while balancing the day to day obligations of an estimating department.
They had to review and respond to 1,000+ page contracts under tight deadlines, and they often had to process multiple contracts every week.
They could not quickly or consistently screen projects, and invested too much time and effort reviewing RFTs that ultimately weren’t worth bidding on.
Request a DemoWe knew we needed to change our process,” Don White, Chief Estimator at NAC explained. “We were spending a week or more reviewing every RFTs we received, and some weeks we had to review two or three RFTs at a time.
NAC felt they could save time and negotiate better terms if they found a more efficient way to review contracts and manage the risks they carried. That’s when they found Provision.
They responded to a message from Provision, and learned more about the solution.
NAC requested a consultation and demo, and decided to try Provision out.
Perhaps the biggest benefit we saw Provision could offer was time saved performing front end reviews of tender documents,” Don said. “We saw if it did what it said it did, it would literally save us days of review time.
NAC quickly integrated Provision into their project review process. Provision was a plug-and-play piece of software, and their support team helped NAC get the most out of the solution. Provision’s team onboarded NAC with three in-person sessions and configured their risk review to look for the specific risks NAC cared most about. NAC also created custom risk lists on Provision to reduce the risk of previous disputes and claims recurring. Using Provision, NAC immediately automated a large amount of their contract review tasks. By doing so, they solved all of the core problems they were suffering from. With Provision, NAC:
Provision also made managing contract risks more collaborative. It gave NAC a central home for both pre-construction and construction teams. If Provision finds a risk in an RFT, it’s easy to flag it for legal review. If a client raises a dispute during construction, operations can quickly look up the relevant terms and push back when needed. Overall, Provision is helping NAC work through more RFTs, faster and easier.
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.
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.
As Don at NAC summarizes:
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.