Gecina – Building from the Ground Up with Market Dojo

–

Overview

It’s safe to say, Gecina knows real estate. Gecina is a real estate company which owns, manages and develops a real estate portfolio of about 20 billion Euros. 

With many moving parts to manage, Gecina needed to centralise its buying activities so in 2019, Gecina’s Purchasing department was formally created at the Paris headquarters. Its main responsibilities are to manage services and maintenance tenders across the group’s entire portfolio, and renovation work on residences and offices. 

This marked the beginning of Market Dojo’s long term, transformative partnership with Gecina. Five years on from the initial Market Dojo Sourcing implementation, we caught up with Anne Paran, Acheteur Travaux et Maintenance (Works and Maintenance Buyer), to find out how Market Dojo continues to deliver value to Gecina.

* All quotes are translated from French and edited for clarity.

Read on for full case study or download PDF in English / PDF in French

Challenges

How it all started

Like many Procurement departments, Gecina’s RFPs were originally managed by emails and spreadsheets, and in some cases the suppliers’ offers were received in sealed envelopes.

However, it soon became clear to the team that the process needed to be simplified by leveraging e-sourcing tools, and to provide greater traceability and visibility of the data for future audits and risk mitigation. Staying true to Gecina’s ethical principles, they also wanted to establish a process that treated all participants in a fair, transparent manner.

Gecina went out to market to find a modular, best-of-breed solution that would be agile to the team’s evolving needs. Market Dojo Sourcing was ultimately selected for its ease of use, rapid deployment and outstanding customer support.

Solution

Fast forward to today

Our first question to Anne was about how Gecina is using Market Dojo Sourcing today.

“All our tenders are stored on Market Dojo so we can see all follow-up questions and answers [from suppliers]. When Project Management Support or Project Managers accompany us on consultations, particularly construction works, they also have access and can download the documents from the Market Dojo platform – so we’ve created a ‘closed circuit’ – there is no loss of information.” 

Anne goes on to explain, “The idea is that everyone uses it, in particular internal stakeholders and clients who we work with. We encourage them to use Market Dojo if they have questions or if they have additional documents to submit, (which can happen during the tender). Therefore, [internal] adoption was relatively fast as Market Dojo Sourcing made it possible to really facilitate project management and be a valuable tool for this function.”

Success through simplicity

Gecina’s success with the solution is largely a result of Market Dojo Sourcing’s simplicity and ease of use, ensuring good adoption with the team and across departments. 

“It [Market Dojo Sourcing] was adopted easily for two reasons. First of all, the simplicity of the tool. It’s not a complicated portal. There are not 10 menus, sub-menus, sub-criteria, etc.” says Anne. 

She goes on to explain, “In addition, for our process we use the duplication feature which allows us to reuse tenders. As soon as I have made a first consultation and set up a tender, I replicate it; I adapt it to my new consultation; I change the documents, my specs and then it’s fine. It’s very easy to use.”

Effortless implementation

Recalling the reasons for choosing Market Dojo as Gecina’s sourcing solution provider, Anne expands on how effortless it was to implement the system.

“The advantage of Market Dojo is that it is easy to set up and does not require you to connect with other tools. We met Market Dojo in September, and by November, we had launched the first tenders. It is very easy to deploy and it’s still a big advantage today in that we don’t have to ask questions about how to synchronise with our ERP system, for example. This was our wish, to have something independent and very easy to use. If our ERP system changes tomorrow, that’s no problem, we are independent from that.”

For Gecina, as with many customers, integration with an existing ERP system was not a requirement. However, should this be necessary, Market Dojo’s modular approach and open API library means integration is possible with existing enterprise solutions, whilst maintaining the flexibility to switch providers if your needs change in the future.

Learn more about Market Dojo’s API integration

Results

A true time saver

Aside from ease of use, Anne experiences significant time savings by using Market Dojo Sourcing, “It’s allowed us to save a huge amount of time, I have everything in the same place so I don’t have to check my emails for example, ‘Did I send it to the right person?’ It keeps my history organised.”

By having the team’s information centralised, there are also benefits in terms of data capture/retrieval, Anne delves into this deeper. 

“Looking back today, we’ve been using it [Market Dojo Sourcing] for over 4 years and we have the history of who we consulted with and when. It’s very easy to find this information, such as the price/offers received. If there are sometimes small doubts about contracts – or if I no longer remember what was discussed, and we do not necessarily have all the details in the contract – I can go and recheck what had been specified by a supplier during the tenders phase. There is this real simplicity and benefit of verification by having all the files, all the information, in the same place linked to a tender.”

Improving supplier interactions

In the early days, the purchasing team were concerned about how well suppliers would use the system, especially those that were used to communicating through emails. We asked Anne how the platform has impacted supplier interactions.

“We do see a difference depending on the size of the supplier company. If they are large organisations who are more used to responding to tenders with fairly structured Purchasing teams, they are already used to using digitised processes so are very comfortable with the tool – even if there are several rounds of negotiations, use of online messaging – there is no problem.”

“With smaller companies, there is a little bit of support required. We have small service providers – SMEs, SMIs – so obviously, they are less used to it and there’s a need to support them. But there is never anyone who resists using the tool, so it works well.”

Anne goes on to say, “Compared to emails, the advantage is that it projects a certain maturity of Gecina’s purchasing team, compared to, let’s say, ‘the old-fashioned approach’.”

Greater transparency

Another benefit of having a centralised platform is to facilitate internal reporting and auditing. 

“We use Market Dojo when we have debriefing and offer analysis meetings with our internal clients, and we can give access to our Audit department if they need to verify something from time to time,” explains Anne. “And of course, our directors can check information or verify certain elements [in the process] at any time, especially if someone in the team is absent.”

Furthermore, this transparency extends beyond internal stakeholders to interim consultants.

“There are often consultants that are helping with tenders or providing a project management role who can access the platform as Hosts. But they are not full time users – perhaps they intervene once then will not intervene again for 3 years – so they need the tool to be fluid, to be able to easily access the information and if necessary, answer questions from suppliers.”

Gecina’s customer experience

To wrap up, Anne describes how Market Dojo has supported Gecina.

“We have a very good relationship with Market Dojo. The Customer Support team is very responsive, especially at the beginning when we started using the tool – there were things that we wanted to modify to customise our UX, so over the entire first year we had a few change requests for the tool which were all taken into account quickly. There was a real collaborative approach and attentiveness which was a big plus.”

“Today, all is great; there are far fewer requests for improvement and we exclusively use Market Dojo Souring which is working very well for us.”

Key lessons learnt

We asked Anne for any advice and tips she would give to someone who is just starting a digital transformation project in sourcing. 

“My advice for any Purchasing team that is still using emails and Excel files is to evolve. Move to a solution that allows all the information to be stored in the same place including historical data – it’s a real time saver.”

“By using Market Dojo Sourcing to digitise Gecina’s tender management, it also allows the Procurement team to reflect a certain professionalism – it enables us to formalise our processes, to show that we have a real method and rigour in the management of our procurement projects.”

And lastly…

Would you recommend Market Dojo?

“If you want to digitise your tender management via an easy-to-use tool from a company where both the Customer Support team and the Sales team listens to the customer, don’t hesitate! It definitely has worked for us,” concludes Anne.