Mairistem Customer Story

What are the challenges of using Word and Excel for complex public tenders?

Using traditional tools like Word and Excel for complex public tenders leads to broken formatting, version control chaos, and high compliance risks. For Mairistem, documents exceeding 500 pages caused software crashes, while manual updates resulted in time-consuming checks and the constant risk of using outdated administrative certificates.

Every year, Mairistem's teams respond to dozens of highly regulated public tenders. With eight employees from different departments collaborating on bid submissions, technical proposals, and financial offers, maintaining quality and consistency was a major struggle. Public sector bids require massive amounts of documentation, strict adherence to formatting rules, and perfectly up-to-date administrative proofs.

Before XaitProposal, Mairistem relied on Excel matrices to automate Word document generation. While this worked for simple files, it quickly reached its limits as documents became more complex and extensive. Teams constantly battled unexpected page breaks, missing footers, and the sheer difficulty of maintaining a consistent layout across massive documents.

About Mairistem

A subsidiary of the JVS Group, Mairistem is a French software publisher that has been supporting local authorities for more than 40 years in managing and modernizing public services. The company develops a comprehensive suite of business software solutions covering finance, human resources, civil registration, water and wastewater management, citizen engagement, cybersecurity, and technical services.

Furthermore, keeping administrative and technical documents up to date relied heavily on manual checks. A missing or outdated certificate alone can result in immediate disqualification from a public tender, making the old process not just time-consuming, but incredibly risky for the business.

Why did Mairistem choose XaitProposal for document automation?

Mairistem chose XaitProposal because it offers a mature, easy-to-use solution that produces professional, reliable documents without requiring complex IT administration. It provides automated formatting, content update alerts, and seamless template integration, ensuring high-quality output and strict compliance for public sector bids.

After evaluating several solutions on the market, Mairistem selected XaitProposal to simplify their tender response production while ensuring maximum document quality. The platform is specifically designed to balance the needs of administrators with an intuitive experience for end users.

Today, Mairistem uses XaitProposal daily to create bid submission packages, technical proposals, and complex administrative documents. They rely on four core capabilities to drive their success:

Automated Formatting: Teams no longer waste time manually fixing layouts. The software protects margins, numbering, and styles automatically.
Content Update Alerts: Automated notifications alert teams when a document or certificate is about to expire, guaranteeing the content library is always accurate and compliant.
Merge Fields for Personalization: Teams can easily and quickly tailor content for each specific municipality or project, all while maintaining a rigid, consistent structure.
Final Output Preview: Users can instantly preview the final document before exporting, guaranteeing the exact look and feel of the final deliverable.

How much time did Mairistem save on bid compilation with XaitProposal?

Mairistem reduced their tender submission compilation time from an entire day down to just 20 minutes using XaitProposal. By centralizing content, automating formatting, and utilizing predefined templates, the team eliminated manual document assembly, allowing them to focus entirely on content strategy and quality.

By centralizing content and automating formatting, Mairistem has drastically improved both the speed and reliability of their tender process.

Beyond the pure time savings, centralized content management has significantly reduced the risk of errors and typos. Deliverables are of a much higher quality, and the entire response process is far more secure. The Mairistem team quickly embraced the solution, fully integrating it into their daily workflows. Because the software removed the most frustrating administrative burdens from their plates, user adoption was seamless. As Frédéric notes: "Today, our teams tell me: we simply couldn’t work without it."

How does XaitWebProposal improve commercial client presentations?

XaitWebProposal transforms traditional, static PowerPoint slides into engaging, interactive web-based mini-sites. For Mairistem, this creates a single source of truth for all sales teams, ensuring up-to-date data, synchronized messaging, and a highly differentiated customer experience during sourcing evaluations.

In addition to XaitProposal, Mairistem adopted XaitWebProposal to elevate their commercial presentations and client meetings. Previously, teams relied on static PowerPoint presentations where content was easily duplicated, modified off-brand, and quickly fell out of sync across different regional offices. Today, information is centralized within an interactive, web-based mini-site accessible to all stakeholders.

A Single Source of Truth: Regardless of location, every sales rep has access to the same approved figures and messaging. "Whether it’s my colleague in Brittany or me in Lorraine, we all have the right figures and messages in one single source."
A Differentiating Customer Experience: Clients immediately noticed the upgrade from traditional slide decks, offering highly positive feedback during sourcing presentations.
A New Approach to Appendices: Moving forward, Mairistem plans to gradually transform all traditional document appendices into interactive web-based content, ensuring supporting documentation is always maintained and easily updated.

What are the next steps for Mairistem’s proposal management strategy?

Following the success of XaitProposal and XaitWebProposal, Mairistem is expanding its proposal management ecosystem by adopting XaitAssistant. This AI-driven tool will further enhance their workflows by automating content proofreading and summarization, continuing to drive efficiency, compliance, and document quality.

For Frédéric Bonnet, the digital transformation across the company's bid management process is already clear, and adding AI capabilities is the natural next step to support their growing team.