StudentFlex talents deliver an AI project that provides Dura Vermeer with major efficiency gains every year.

The challenge at Dura Vermeer

Dura Vermeer is a leading family-owned company in the construction, infrastructure, and real estate sector, active in the Netherlands for more than 165 years. With a strong focus on sustainability, innovation, and collaboration, the company delivers a wide range of projects, from residential and commercial construction to infrastructure and area development. To improve efficiency and accuracy in project budgeting, Dura Vermeer brought in student talents to critically evaluate existing processes and automate where possible. At the same time, they explored opportunities to apply AI, ensuring the company remains agile and competitive in a rapidly changing market. Driven by the ambition to work smarter, faster, and more sustainably, Dura Vermeer launched a project to remove daily bottlenecks. Volatile material and labor costs made reliable budgeting increasingly complex. On top of that, traditional manual processes were time-consuming and error-prone, making the need for scalable, technology-driven automation ever more urgent. The challenge lay in finding tech-savvy talent that showed ownership and the courage to move fast. Dura Vermeer was looking for young professionals who were not only analytically strong but also bold enough to challenge existing ways of working and improve them with automation and AI.

Our approach

At every intake, we invest time in getting to know the person behind the talent, their strengths and ambitions. Because we stay closely connected to our community of 16,500 students and actively track changes within it, we know exactly what’s happening and can act fast and accurately whenever an organization needs new talent. For Dura Vermeer, we identified candidates with strong technical and analytical skills, combined with the character and drive to truly make an impact.

The results

The StudentFlex talents immediately got to work optimizing the Metacom library, significantly increasing efficiency and laying the foundation for a scalable way of working. At the same time, they developed real-time AI integration by building AI code that automatically updates project budgets with live data. As a result, budgeting became faster, smarter, and more accurate, helping Dura Vermeer respond effectively to price fluctuations and shifting market conditions. Beyond these technical improvements, the placed talents also delivered 'consultant-style support'. Acting as internal consultants, they critically reviewed processes, improved workflows, and accelerated innovation initiatives. This not only drove direct process optimization but also strengthened Dura Vermeer’s culture of continuous improvement and innovation. The outcome of this collaboration: Dura Vermeer moved from solid processes to smart, future-proof operations. Project budgeting is now faster and more precise, the organization has become more agile and resilient, and the contributions of these student talents created sustainable innovations that will continue to deliver value in the long term.