How Zeal Sourcing helped Leijona Catering to change its sourcing operations - saving time and money.
Leijona Catering Oy's chefs and other staff prepare and deliver around 70 000 meals a day to large numbers of customers and in varying conditions, under forest canopies and festive crystal chandeliers.
Founded in 2012, the company provides all food services for the Finnish Defence Forces, and food services for the prisons of the Criminal Sanctions Agency.
As a company operating in safety-critical and security of supply environments, successful public procurement is particularly important for Leijona Catering.
Overcoming procurement challenges
Leijona Catering Oy regularly invites public tenders for food deliveries. This ensures that customers receive quality meals at the right price and that the food market operates efficiently.
The process is overseen by Sami Karling, the company's Procurement Director, who is responsible for its procurement and supply chain functions.
"For our public tender, we have to define each product technically - including size and packaging - in advance," he explains. "As far as possible, we also estimate the purchase volumes of the various products for the future."
According to Sami, preparing this information easily and quickly for potential suppliers was not easy: "The requirements in the tender documents defined our product in general terms, but our real demand was linked to specific brands. In addition, many of the products we needed were not part of our previous tender, and the products had changed since the previous tender."
Because the company had to go through thousands of purchase product lines, it had previously used a manual approach to provide bidders with the right information and requirements by product - including volumes.
"Cleaning or editing data manually is a very laborious task, where human work is precision-intensive and monotonous in the long run," explains the procurement director. "It is also very costly because it requires a large number of skilled people who understand the data being processed."
To reduce manual work, the procurement director started looking for a partner to solve the problem.
Finding the right partner
After consulting several companies, Zeal Sourcing, a full-service sourcing specialist based in Helsinki, was found as a partner to support companies that want to buy better.
Sami explains, "Zeal Sourcing quickly understood our business problem and started solving it quite independently, with little guidance from us."
He continues, "The people at Zeal Sourcing are a great group of procurement professionals who are easy and fun to work with."
The company considered hiring an IT firm specialising in AI and analytics, but did not want to because "it would have required a lot of clarification of the principles of cost analysis in procurement" and the team needed more guidance to understand "our real problem and what we needed to successfully move forward with our project".
Achieving success
Procurement Director Sami Karling has been pleased with how Zeal Sourcing has facilitated the way his team prepares for the tender.
"Zeal used AI to match our demand data to the original RFP document at a general level. Alongside this, they added new generic items that were missing from the original RFP document."
The speed of the solution was impressive, as Sami explains: "We got mostly correctly classified data in days, instead of spending months of our full-time resources processing the data. The project left a reasonable amount of work for our professional staff to process the data.
"We still had to go through and validate the data. Although there were some errors, the AI either gets it right or is clearly wrong, so it was easy for us to spot and correct the errors."
The project saved weeks or months of the procurement team's time and tens of thousands - if not hundreds of thousands - in salary costs.
He recommends Zeal Sourcing to procurement professionals, "I believe that many organisations would benefit from using an expert like Zeal Sourcing to help them better define their procurement knowledge and use new technology-based solutions to model business problems in procurement projects."
A public call for tender for the supply of food and non-food products has been launched on the market in June 2024. The analysis of the tender material of around 1,000 lines started with Zeal Sourcing in February 2024. The value of the contract is expected to exceed €100 million in the coming contract period.
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