Customer story:

Pomona Group brings structure, speed, and compliance to 2,000 tenders a year with XaitProposal

From inconsistent, time-consuming processes to reliable, structured, and compliant bids: Pomona Group's transformation with XaitProposal.

By centralizing content, fostering seamless collaboration, and ensuring content reliability, XaitProposal has helped Pomona Group streamline its extensive tender management, supporting its growth, agility, and CSR commitments.

Logo TerreAzzur 2

Region
France

Company size
12000

Industry
Food Distribution

Solution
XaitProposal

Pomona Group, the national leader in delivering food products to catering professionals and local specialist shops, operates on a massive scale with €5.3 billion in sales in 2023, 12,000 employees, and 194 sites across France and Spain. Their mission is clear: "To help professionals in the catering trade to feed their customers better and better." This mission demands efficient and consistent responses to approximately 2,000 tenders annually from their TerreAzur, PassionFroid, and EpiSaveurs branches.

For years, managing this high volume of tenders using disparate regional methods resulted in inconsistencies and inefficiencies—until they implemented XaitProposal.

Éric Juttin, Public Procurement Director at Pomona Group, explains how their team moved from individual regional content management to a harmonized, collaborative, and highly agile system that ensures reliability and supports their comprehensive CSR strategy.

About TerreAzur

Pomona Group, the national leader in delivering food products to catering professionals and local specialist shops, operates on a massive scale with €5.3 billion in sales in 2023, 12,000 employees, and 194 sites across France and Spain. Their mission is clear: "To help professionals in the catering trade to feed their customers better and better." This mission demands efficient and consistent responses to approximately 2,000 tenders annually from their TerreAzur, PassionFroid, and EpiSaveurs branches.

“We save time establishing the structure of the offer and can devote it to customising the sales pitch to the customer's expectations.”

– Éric Juttin, Public Procurement Director at Pomona Group

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"Everyone had their own way": The challenges of decentralized tender work

Before XaitProposal, Pomona Group's approach to tender responses lacked a unified strategy. Each region operated independently, leading to inconsistencies in sales documents and content management.

"Before XaitProposal, everyone worked in their own region, with less day-to-day alignment and support. Everyone had their own way of managing content. As a result, our sales documents lacked consistency in terms of the content," explains Éric Juttin.

Pomona Group identified key objectives for implementing a new solution:

  • Standardization & Consistency: The primary goal was to ensure all Group entities, regardless of size, communicated the same level of information and maintained consistent content.
  • Improving Productivity: They needed to work more quickly on time-consuming tasks and make information more reliable to support continued growth.
  • Structured Collaboration: The objective was to structure working methods and cooperate effectively on commercial documents that represent the company.
  • Agility & Efficiency: To keep pace with growth, they sought a tool that would bring greater fluidity, efficiency, and agility to their operations.

“XaitProposal is a data management tool. A bit like a rocket with several stages, XaitProposal enables us to cooperate on regional content while sharing national content”

– Éric Juttin, Public Procurement Director at Pomona Group

Major Headaches: Dispersed content and lack of cohesion

Before XaitProposal, Pomona's tender process faced recurring issues:

  • Inconsistent Content: Without centralized alignment, sales documents varied significantly in content across regions.
  • Time-Consuming Tasks: Manual content management hindered speed and efficiency, impacting responsiveness to tenders.
  • Reliability Concerns: Disparate information sources led to concerns about the reliability of content being submitted.
  • Lack of Centralized Control: There was no single source of truth for commercial document content, making it difficult to ensure consistency and quality.

"A Rocket with Several Stages": How XaitProposal turned it around

To meet these challenges and sustain their growth, Pomona Group chose XaitProposal. The tool is now used by public procurement assistants and managers across the TerreAzur, PassionFroid, and EpiSaveurs branches to draft technical briefs and prepare applications for their 2,000 annual tenders.

"XaitProposal is a data management tool. A bit like a rocket with several stages, XaitProposal enables us to cooperate on regional content while sharing national content," explains Éric Juttin.

Several aspects of XaitProposal made a difference:

  1. Continuous Evolution & Support: "The tool is constantly evolving and adapting to the way we respond to calls for tender. Our Xait project manager, Muguette, supports all our teams on an almost daily basis. This allows us to develop the content and the way we use it."
  2. Reliable Content Management: XaitProposal acts as a "living library" where all information is constantly updated. Pomona works closely with marketing and a dedicated working group to ensure content is current, subject matter is renewed, and visuals are adapted. "To get the most out of it, it's essential to get to grips with XaitProposal and use it regularly. All the information provided in the tool must be constantly updated, as it is a living library."
  3. Customization & Agility: "We save time establishing the structure of the offer and can devote it to customising the sales pitch to the customer's expectations." This allows them to easily find the right information for increasingly discerning buyers and adapt quickly to specific customer requests.
  4. Information Sharing & Compliance: "XaitProposal allows us to provide reliable and coherent answers." The tool's ability to share information, especially regarding changes in their business and regulations, is a significant advantage. This also supports their CSR approach.
XaitProposal screen mockup with logo

“The tool is constantly evolving and adapting to the way we respond to calls for tender. Our Xait project manager, Muguette, supports all our teams on an almost daily basis. This allows us to develop the content and the way we use it.”

– Éric Juttin, Public Procurement Director at Pomona Group

Objectives Achieved: Content Control and CSR Compliance

Pomona Group has successfully achieved its objectives, significantly advancing its content control and strategic initiatives:

  • Enhanced Content Control: "We have taken a major step forward in controlling our content. All the information we transmit is duly checked by all the Group's departments: marketing, quality, legal... all our information is verifiable."
  • CSR Alignment: "This progress echoes commitment 2 of our CSR approach: ‘Supporting our customers with secure and eco-responsible services’." This demonstrates how XaitProposal directly contributes to their sustainability goals.
  • CSR Label Confirmation: The rigorous content control facilitated by XaitProposal played a role in their efforts to obtain the 'Confirmed' level of the Engaged CSR label awarded by Afnor.

What's next: Adapting to Surgical Client Expectations

The business of responding to calls for tender has evolved. "We used to respond to global requests. Today, we respond to frameworks imposed by our customers. We have to continually adapt our content to match the concerns of our buyers," explains Éric Juttin.

For the future, Pomona Group needs to stay abreast of societal and environmental developments to continually supplement and modify the information they share with customers. As customers become more sophisticated, the demand for increasingly "surgical" and detailed information requires Pomona to go further in the levels of detail they communicate. XaitProposal will continue to be a vital tool in meeting these evolving, highly specific client expectations.

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