Entegra

The Client

Entegra, a subsidiary of Sodexo, is the world's largest food group purchasing organization (GPO). With the buying power of $36 billion in supplier contracts, Entegra helps clients at 120,000+ sites across North America improve their efficiency and operational performance. Sodexo is a global leader in services that improve quality of life, an essential factor in individual and organizational performance. Operating in 56 countries, Sodexo serves 100 million consumers daily through its unique combination of on-site food and facilities management services, benefits and rewards services, and personal and home services.

The Situation

Entegra had several business objectives for this project, including enhancing its position in the market, improving customer satisfaction, driving revenue growth, and facilitating the company's overall success.

Entegra wanted to position itself as a digital leader in the GPO industry. To do this, it needed to leverage innovative design, data analytics, and content delivery to create a user-centered, self-service experience, allowing its customers to get real-time, actionable reports and data on purchasing habits, including insights on how and where to find savings. 

Entegra wanted to bring more functionality to its Entegra PurchasingIQ Platform, which is a platform for its GPO customers to manage membership; access savings programs and catalogs; leverage robust analytics capabilities showing client performance, industry benchmarking, supply trends, and industry news; get insights into savings opportunities; access payment information and more. It aimed to create a comprehensive one-stop shop for clients to easily access information throughout the buying process. 

Additionally, Entegra wanted to provide clients with better, readily available data visualizations, empowering clients to make swift, informed decisions with visibility into their spending data and savings opportunities. 

Entegra ultimately wanted to play a leading role in digital transformation in the digital GPO domain, prioritizing customer satisfaction and retention, increasing contract utilization rates, selling more services, and fostering and nurturing the development of client relationships. Its overall goal was to build a best-in-class, frictionless experience that would drive increased revenue and customer retention, leading to profitable growth for both the Entegra business and its customers.

The Challenge

The company faced several technology challenges. It needed to select a content management system (CMS) and digital experience platform (DXP) that would provide a solid technical foundation that was still flexible enough to accommodate unique use cases like complex permission settings, large volumes of data, and custom integrations.

One major challenge was that the company’s previous platform limited data availability for Entegra clients, hindering their ability to make informed buying decisions. Additionally, clients had difficulty visually interpreting the data, meaning clients had to reach out to Entegra account executives to obtain additional spending data. There was also a lack of visibility into local, regional, and direct spending and challenges with clients underutilizing contracts, not fully realizing the value that stood to be gained. Entegra needed to determine how best to display the data through the CMS in a dynamic and user-friendly manner. It also needed to provide clients with self-serve reporting capabilities and comprehensive visibility into spend and volume.

Another hurdle was the absence of timely data updates within the existing platform. Furthermore, because its current offerings were scattered across different platforms, Entegra wanted to create a centralized source of information that allowed clients to more easily access and navigate the company’s complete range of products and services. And Entegra wanted to ensure a seamless user experience for internal and external users — it didn’t want users to have to log into the DAM with separate user accounts.  

The biggest challenge, however, was that the company needed to integrate multiple technologies and platforms — including Acquia Personalization, Acquia Search, Google Analytics, Microsoft Power BI, Salesforce, Entegra Global Data Warehouse, single sign-on (SSO), and Acquia DAM. There was also a huge dataset, which meant the solution had to handle the larger data storage needs. 

The Solution

Entegra tapped Bounteous to assist in determining the right platform for its new Entegra PurchasingIQ Platform. Entegra wanted to do a proof of concept (POC) to ensure it would have the right tools and tech stack to achieve its goals. Once the teams completed the POC, Entegra concluded that combining Bounteous, Power BI, Drupal, and Acquia was the right fit to bring the Entegra PurchasingIQ Platform to life.

In the Discover phase, the Bounteous team worked with Entegra to understand the new platform's current pain points and goals and define high-level requirements. Bounteous conducted a series of workshops with key stakeholders on the Entegra team, allowing it to create unique personas and user journeys to guide the design and implementation of the rest of the project.

After the Discover phase, Bounteous and Entegra wanted to ensure the digital experience was best-in-class and efficient. The goal was to remove friction from key touchpoints, drive program adoption, increase capacity utilization rates (CURs), and ultimately optimize growth. 

Bounteous and Entegra then engaged in a detailed Conceive phase, working together to determine the best solution, refine detailed requirements, and design a state-of-the-art digital platform. The outputs included detailed wireframes, mockups for the site's most important pages and components, and detailed architecture and requirements documentation. 

Bounteous and Entegra embarked on the Build phase, where the teams implemented the designs and solutions. This project had many unique parts, including implementing Acquia and other products to meet Entegra’s business needs. Bounteous’ Acquia DAM implementation included finding solutions and customizing features specific to Entegra's business. To achieve a seamless experience, Bounteous used Acquia DAM to build a fully custom document repository that seamlessly integrated into the Drupal site and provided a simple UI similar to that of large file-sharing sites. The document repository allows users to search, browse, favorite, archive, preview, and download assets directly from Drupal without granting restricted users access to the Drupal core admin UI or Media overview.

Additionally, Bounteous collaborated with Entegra and CGI to integrate Power BI, allowing the teams to embed custom reports throughout the site to easily filter and analyze data related to spending, savings opportunities, and order volumes. Integration with Salesforce Marketing Cloud was crucial for Entegra to synchronize all customer records across the two systems. Bounteous leveraged Acquia Search to ensure that all articles, reports, documents, etc., would be searchable by Entegra’s customers. And Bounteous used React to build the savings optimizer module, allowing customers to analyze spending and receive intelligent recommendations for increasing savings. 

The teams also constructed a data warehouse that leveraged AWS and Acquia VPC security features, capable of handling over 500 million data records for displaying reports and information to customers. Lastly, Bounteous leveraged Acquia Personalization, creating a personalization foundation on the Entegra PurchasingIQ Platform.
 

The Results

Entegra’s platform is in the late stages of development, with a projected minimum viable product (MVP) version coming soon. The teams anticipate several positive outcomes for Entegra based on the chosen tech stack, including:

• A significant increase in client enrollment to use the platform
• Improvements in client retention and satisfaction
• Effective positioning of Entegra as a digital leader in the GPO space
• Increased customer retention, acquisition, and engagement. 
• Improved operational efficiencies due to enhanced internal user engagement, the number of support tickets serviced, and time spent on support tickets
   

Damien Calderini, CEO and President at Entegra Procurement Services remarked, “The implementation of the Entegra PurchasingIQ Platform was an integral part of our strategy to establish ourselves not only as North America's largest food group purchasing organization (GPO), but as the leading digital GPO.”