Customer Overview
Sandock Austral Shipyards, headquartered in Durban, South Africa, is the largest shipyard in the country. The company designs, builds, and repairs vessels for both the navy/military and commercial markets, and also provides fabrication services for offshore oil & gas.
Inside the Transformation
Hear directly from the people behind Sandock Austral’s AI-powered evolution. In this exclusive two-part interview series, CEO Prasheen Maharaj and Senior Estimator Cameron Randall share how Noxus helped them move from manual tender management to a fully automated, high-performance workflow, cutting preparation time by 75% while eliminating human error.
Business Challenge
Tender preparation was manual, time-consuming, and error-prone. Each bid required multiple departments to compile documentation, check compliance, and manually stamp and sign hundreds of pages.A single missing page, unchecked box, or forgotten signature could lead to an automatic rejection, a serious risk for a company competing in highly regulated government and defense tenders.
“A single missed tick or signature could cost us the entire bid.” — Cameron Randall, Senior Estimator
The process also stretched resources thin. Typically seven to eight teams, across finance, HR, legal, technical, project management, health and safety, and supply chain, were all involved. The entire cycle could take up to two weeks for large tenders, and even smaller RFQs took several hours to complete.
With the company aiming for greater efficiency and growth, this bottleneck limited the number of tenders Sandock could pursue and slowed its ability to scale
At a glance
- People involved: 7–8 business units per tender
- Duration: ~2 weeks for large tenders, ~4 hours per RFQ
- Main risks: Human error, missing compliance items, disqualified submissions
- Impact: Limited throughput and slowed growth capacity
Noxus Solution
Since implementing Noxus AI, Sandock Austral’s tender process has shifted from a multi-department, manual effort to a streamlined, largely automated workflow.
What previously required seven or eight departments and could take up to two weeks for large tenders is now completed in just two days, and smaller RFQs take around one hour from start to finish. The entire process is consistent, traceable, and fully compliant, every submission is automatically assembled, stamped, signed, and validated before it ever leaves the building.
The AI workflow pulls in all company and compliance documents, auto-fills recurring details like registration numbers and tax IDs, and digitally stamps and signs every page. It ensures no page, signature, or attachment is missed, eliminating one of the biggest risks in Sandock’s previous tender cycle.
“If I have a set of RFQs due on Friday, I don’t need to start on Monday anymore. The AI workflow assembles everything — all I have to do is check the final output.” — Cameron Randall, Senior Estimator
By removing repetitive admin work, the process has freed Sandock’s team to focus on bid quality, pricing strategy, and procurement efficiency, instead of filling out forms or cross-checking pages.
“What used to take two weeks now takes two days for large bids, and for smaller ones, only hours. It’s consistent, traceable, and it frees our people to focus on winning, not typing.” — Prasheen Maharaj, CEO
The result is a tender workflow that operates with speed, precision, and accountability, while giving Sandock’s people the time to do what matters most, win more work.
Results & Impact
Implementing Noxus AI delivered immediate, measurable improvements across Sandock Austral’s tender operations:
- 75% Faster Tender PreparationWhat previously took four hours now takes about one. Large bids that once spanned two weeks are completed in just two days, dramatically accelerating turnaround times.
- Zero Rejections from Human ErrorEvery tender is now automatically stamped, signed, and validated, eliminating the risk of missing pages, unchecked boxes, or compliance oversights.
- 7× Increase in Tender CapacityBy compressing submission times, Sandock can now respond to up to seven times more tenders each month with the same team, directly expanding revenue potential.
Why Sandock chose Noxus
Sandock Austral selected Noxus as a strategic platform to accelerate digital transformation without needing internal AI or IT infrastructure. The partnership combined Noxus’s platform, speed of deployment, and business-focused approach with Sandock’s deep industry expertise.
No-Code Deployment, Enterprise ImpactNoxus enabled Sandock to automate complex tender processes without hiring data scientists or developers, empowering business users to configure and manage workflows independently.
Fast Time-to-ValueImplementation took just three to four weeks from kickoff to production, allowing Sandock to realize measurable ROI within the first month.
“I never look for service providers; I look for business partners. Noxus was a perfect fit to navigate our journey into the next hundred years.” — Prasheen Maharaj, CEO
Hands-On Guidance and Enablement With no internal CIO or IT team, Sandock relied on Noxus to provide full technical enablement: from design to deployment. The Noxus team worked side by side with Sandock’s bid specialists, transforming their expertise into automated logic.
Human-Centric TransformationNoxus’s collaborative approach helped Sandock’s teams embrace AI as an empowering tool, not a replacement — building enthusiasm and trust across departments.
Future Expansion
Following the success of its tender automation workflow, Sandock Austral is expanding the use of Noxus across multiple areas of the business. Both leadership and operational teams see automation not as a one-off project, but as a long-term enabler of global efficiency and competitiveness:
- Supplier Pricing Database:Using Noxus workflows to collect, normalize, and structure supplier quotes from around the world, overcoming access barriers (eg. language, time-zone) while building a central, searchable pricing database.
- Budgetary Estimation Automation:Creating automated workflows to generate rough order of magnitude (ROM) cost estimates instantly, helping clients validate project feasibility early and saving time for both parties.
- AI Coworker for Vessel Design:Leveraging Noxus’s platform to generate vessel specifications from minimal client inputs, such as size, type, and purpose, turning a short brief into a detailed technical specification.
“AI isn’t a project for us — it’s a philosophy. We’re scaling it across every process so that Sandock becomes more efficient, more competitive, and truly global in the way we work.”— Prasheen Maharaj, CEO