How Groupama Supports & Services uses Eleven VMS data to manage its purchasing of intellectual services
At Groupama Supports & Services, an entity of the Groupama group, Augustin de Gérard serves as Head of Purchasing for Intellectual Services. In late June 2026, he shared with Enzo Durrey, Key Account Manager at Eleven VMS, how his team transformed the way they manage the purchasing of intellectual services through better use of data from the VMS. Here's a look back at an approach built step by step.
What was the starting point of your thinking, and what areas of work did you identify?
Augustin De Gérard : The starting point was a fairly simple observation, but a fairly common one in intellectual services purchasing. On one hand, operational teams, the requesters, were receiving a huge number of responses to their calls for tender, but relatively few that were truly relevant to their needs. At the same time, certain rarer skills remained hard to fill using already-known suppliers. And in parallel, they were being contacted directly by suppliers, adding a significant burden to their day-to-day work.
On the other hand, on the Purchasing side, we saw the average daily rate (ADR) climbing steadily, with pricing grids that were difficult to enforce because of the systematic reliance on one-off, mission-by-mission negotiation.
Digging into this with the teams, we naturally identified 5 areas of work:
The quality of responses to calls for tender.
Coverage of needs, even for rare skills.
Commercial relationships with suppliers.
Control over the average daily rate.
Economic management of Purchasing performance.
On this last point in particular, we wanted to be able to demonstrate the value the Purchasing team brought beyond simple rate negotiation.
What made managing these 5 strategic areas difficult until now?
A.G. : The data existed, but it was scattered. We had our own internal repositories: organization by entity, pricing grids, framework agreements. But this data wasn't interfaced with our VMS. On its side, the tool offered standard dashboards and a raw data export that had to be extracted to go any further. So we had two useful building blocks, but they needed to be merged to become usable.
We're no longer in a reactive stance, but a proactive one. […] We now come to the table with factual evidence.
How did you build this approach with Eleven VMS?
A.G. : We set up a daily, automatic export of Eleven VMS data, on a rolling 24-month window: calls for tender, proposals, assignments, activity reports. In parallel, we structured our internal repositories into dedicated files, updated on request. All of this feeds into SharePoint for file management, then into Power BI, which we use both to prepare the data, build our analysis axes and KPIs, and finally to build the dashboards. It's an iterative process, because the market keeps moving and so do our management needs, so we adjust as we go rather than locking in a fixed model.
Concretely, what do these dashboards look like today?
A.G. : We have three main families. The first is the supplier business review: response rate, compliance with pricing grids, proposal conformity, response times to calls for tender. The second is trend analysis: how the average daily rate evolves over time, by profile, by department, with real oversight of overall Purchasing spend. And the third is showcasing Purchasing performance: the real impact of our work on operational costs, processing times, and service quality.
What does this change day-to-day for your team?
A.G. : We're no longer in a reactive stance, but a proactive one. Before, we often discovered ADR drift or coverage issues after the fact. Today, we have a regular, near-continuous view of what's happening on both the supplier and the needs side. It also changes the nature of our exchanges with operational teams: we now come to the table with factual evidence.
We keep refining this, because we see it as a living project rather than a finished one: new management needs keep emerging, new questions keep coming up, and the data we've structured lets us answer them much faster than before.
Turning data into a strategic lever
Groupama Supports & Services' experience reflects a reality shared by many procurement departments: simply having data is no longer enough. The real challenge now is to centralize it, structure it, and put it to work to effectively manage intellectual services, control costs, and demonstrate the value created by Purchasing teams.
