The challenge
Heijmans' process managers wrote Project Management Plans entirely by hand. Each plan takes hours to days of work: gathering information from earlier projects, structuring it along the fixed template and writing it out in the right tone and house style. And since a PMP is typically written by a team of around five people, coordination and version churn come on top.
It's repetitive work that is nonetheless bespoke every time. Standard passages get rewritten from scratch, quality depends on who happens to be writing, and the knowledge locked in hundreds of earlier plans sits scattered across folders and heads. The time spent structuring and writing out prose comes at the expense of where process managers actually make the difference: the substance and strategy of their projects.
The ambition was sharp: automate roughly 80% of the manual writing work, at equal or better document quality. But on the terms of a listed construction group. Everything had to run inside Heijmans' own Azure tenant, behind their own access policies, with encryption, audit logging and the source code in Heijmans' own GitHub. No data leaving the building, no black box.
Our approach
- 01
Drafting from their own knowledge
The suite drafts a plan section by section, working from Heijmans' official templates and a knowledge base of historical plans and guidelines. Through a chat interface the process manager steers the generation: project context in, sharpened copy out, with visibility into which sources were used.
- 02
Human in the loop, team in the editor
AI drafts, people decide. The whole team works in the same editor at once, changes show up instantly and every version stays traceable. Once the plan is done, the suite exports it to Heijmans' official Word format.
- 03
Entirely within Heijmans' walls
The suite runs entirely inside Heijmans' Azure tenant, shielded within their network, with sign-in through Entra ID and mandatory MFA. The source code lives in Heijmans' own GitHub and Heijmans owns the solution. We build, they own.
- 04
From pilot to platform
After a successful pilot with five process managers, a second engagement grew the suite into a company-wide platform: workspaces that keep document families strictly separated, roles and permissions managed through Entra ID groups, template versioning with a full audit trail, and an infrastructure that, with Redis, a dedicated acceptance environment and automated end-to-end tests, is ready for thousands of documents a year. Every phase closed with an explicit go/no-go moment, and an external penetration test rounds it off.
The result
Time. The suite is designed to take over roughly 80% of the manual writing work, targeting a 50 to 80% time saving per plan. At full scale, with more than a thousand documents a year, that adds up to an estimated saving of 3.6 million euro a year in FTE equivalent. The point is emphatically not to automate people away, but to write faster and better. The process manager's role changes with it: less writing out prose, more direction and substance, and always the final editor of every plan that leaves the building.
Consistency and knowledge retention. Every plan follows the same template, the same guidelines and the same house style, and the experience of hundreds of earlier plans is put to work in every new draft. Quality no longer depends on who happens to be writing that week.
A platform rather than a tool. What started as a PMP generator is now a writing platform on which Heijmans can set up new document families itself, each in its own workspace with its own templates, permissions and versioning. Built for the volume that's coming: from hundreds to thousands of documents a year.
And perhaps the most important result: trust. The writing suite became the pattern for the partnership, and we're now building the next AI applications inside Heijmans along the same approach. Thanks to Niels van de Steeg and the whole Heijmans team for the sharp collaboration.