In this interview, François Carrière, Project Manager and Product Owner for Product Data and Purchases at Transgourmet explains how Equadis supports his company to collect and manage their entire product assortment
A few words about the Transgourmet group ?
You’ve probably already seen a Transgourmet truck on the road. It’s one of the 800 trucks in our fleet, responsible for more than 8,500 deliveries to our customers every day. Transgourmet operates in Europe and is a subsidiary of the Swiss Coop Group. Transgourmet is a leading operator in the French food service market. We provide our customers with food products – fresh, dry, frozen, seafood, butchery, fruit and vegetables – and hygiene products, exclusively to restaurant, catering, hotel, and bakery professionals.
What is the major data challenge for Transgourmet?
As a major operator, Transgourmet needed to implement a solution for acquiring data from manufacturers. In the form of dematerialized data through GDSN, but also through a portal. The advantage and the necessity was to be able to process and receive a very large volume of data, quickly, to speed up product creation, to acquire all possible data on a product with the best quality and the best controls. And also, of course, to avoid re-entering information, which is a waste of time and a risk of quality loss. The data we receive is essential to our day-to-day operations. This includes regulatory data, identification data and, of course, product logistics data. But this data is also essential in our communication with our customers, whether it’s sales or marketing data, or of course the famous INCO data with nutritional values, allergens and ingredients.
Why did you choose Equadis?
Transgourmet began working on data acquisition around ten years ago. For the food service sector, it was quite innovative at the time, especially as the food service sector is few years behind the supermarket sector in terms of dematerialization. In the end, we opted for Equadis, whose references, customers and structure provided us with the guarantee and expertise we needed for our projects. Transgourmet’s need is to have a team that can support us in highly structuring projects, and to be able to provide tools that are tried and tested on large volumes of data.
What have you achieved with Equadis and what value does it bring on a daily basis?
First of all, the Gaia by Equadis platform enables us to monitor the data sheets sent to us by manufacturers on a daily basis, check them and see what is happening. Then there’s the assistance with onboarding manufacturers, whether it’s the manufacturers using GDSN, because not all of them are there yet, or the manufacturers entering their information on the portal. Last but not least, Equadis provides extremely important support for all the developments we make using GDSN information structures and messages, which require specialized expertise. And here, Equadis has accompanied us from the very start of the project. Thanks to the Equadis PIM, we receive data and digital assets issued by manufacturers in real time. Assets are photos, certificates and technical data sheets. We can be assured of the quality of the information, since all the controls linked to GS1 standards are carried out when integrated into the PIM. The Equadis CSM dedicated to our account supported us from the very beginning and helped us with the challenges and specificities of GDSN, which we discovered. We were beginners!
What are the benefits provided by Equadis’ solutions?
It’s the responsiveness and the perfect understanding of the environment in which we operate. I’d say that retail and food service are in Equadis’ DNA. And it is important, because the reliability and reactivity they provide give us the comfort and trust we need to keep moving forward with our current developments.
Any future projects?
We have developments to carry out in order to acquire new data and to distribute data in GS1 format to our main customers. On the other hand, the GDSN information system is going to evolve, as a result of regulations and societal demands, there will be essential changes in all aspects of social, environmental and economic responsibility, which will be imposed on everyone. So, as you can see, we have some exciting projects ahead of us with Equadis, and we’re looking forward to them.