Case Study · Civil Engineering · 45 Staff

What happens when a 45-person civil firm stops writing proposals from scratch.

Meridian Civil Group · Infrastructure + Stormwater · Pacific Northwest
Wukanda engagement: April – July 2025

Meridian was a well-run 45-person civil and stormwater firm with a strong project portfolio and a painful proposal problem: three principals spending 10+ hours each per week assembling proposals from scratch, missing RFPs due to bandwidth, and watching junior staff copy-paste from five-year-old documents.

67%
Reduction in first-draft proposal time, measured at 60 days post-deployment
3×
More RFPs submitted per quarter without adding proposal staff
22 hrs
Weekly principal time recovered across the three-partner team
6 wks
Time to break even on the full Wukanda engagement cost
Before Wukanda
✗Principals spending 10+ hrs/week on proposal boilerplate, assembled manually from old files
✗Missing 2–3 RFPs per quarter due to bandwidth constraints, not capability
✗Project knowledge scattered across 6 shared drives and 12 years of inconsistent file structure
✗Junior staff writing "first drafts" that required complete rewriting by senior staff
✗Estimating relied on whoever had the best memory of a similar past project
✗Field reports taking 3–5 days to finalize; delayed invoicing as a result
After 90 Days with Wukanda
✓Proposal first drafts generated in under 90 minutes by any staff member
✓Responding to every qualifying RFP; win rate up 18% in first two quarters
✓All 12 years of project archives indexed and searchable in natural language
✓Junior staff producing draft-ready proposals; principals reviewing, not rewriting
✓Estimating tool pulls matched past project data in under 5 minutes
✓Field reports drafted same day; invoicing accelerated by average 8 days
"I used to dread Monday mornings because of whatever proposals were due that week. Now I check the draft the tool generated over the weekend and spend an hour refining. It's a completely different firm."
Principal & Co-Founder, Meridian Civil Group
The engagement
How 90 days changed how Meridian operates.

Wukanda's 90-day engagement started with a deep workflow discovery, four sessions with the principals and three project managers to map exactly where time was going. The insight: 72% of proposal time was spent on sections that were nearly identical across all their municipal stormwater bids.

We configured the Proposal Assistant on Meridian's last 40 proposals and 200+ project narratives. In week six, they used it for the first time on a live RFP, a 48-page municipal stormwater management bid. First complete draft in 4 hours. The principal's feedback: "I changed about 30% of it. That's the best first draft I've ever seen."

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