Fontainebleau, France-headquartered Picard Surgelés S.A.S., a frozen food retailer operating more than 950 stores in Europe, has named Lascom CPG to develop product lifecycle management (PLM) software to assist customers with management processes involving documents, products, projects and systems.
Ringing up approximately EUR 1.4 billion in sales per annum, Picard employs 4,500 people and sells more than 1,100 types of frozen products ranging from fruits and vegetables to fish and seafood, starters and appetizers, entrees, pastries, ice cream, cakes, pies and other desserts. In addition to brick-and-mortar retailing, the company also specializes in phone and online order fulfillment.
Picard is expanding worldwide, having recently gone into business in Japan through a partnership with Aeon. The company typically introduces 200 new product innovations each year.
According to a press release from Lascom CPG, management at Picard is convinced that the San Diego, California-based company can fully integrate its business processes to enhance efficiencies. Implementation of a globalization strategy requires Picard to deal with tricky portfolio management issues such as standardizing innovation, reducing time to market, handling a growing volume of data, being multi-regulatory compliant and generating multi-lingual labeling. Some of its main objectives include centralizing product specifications and collaborating better with suppliers.
“It is crucial for our customers to benefit from specifications consistency from suppliers to the shelves,” said Jesus Cortes, project manager at Lascom. “Being able to track and attach data and documents, including certifications to products, considerably eases products portfolio management.”
Lascom’s PLM solution provides a central repository to gather data, documents and other information about both new and existing products that facilitate risk traceability and detailed data tracking. As such, Picard has access to complete and accurate information on food products and ranges as well as on associated documentation including food origin, claims, certification and more. The retailer is able to quickly track any product information and demonstrate comprehensive traceability to customers.
Using Lascom’s supplier portal, Picard is able to fully interact with suppliers to issue bills of specifications, update ingredients, generate technical data sheets and improve traceability. A dedicated access has been customized for customers to easily fill in and update data.
