Europe's largest expert provider of workplace products and services has freed up plenty of time spent on more important and rewarding tasks. This means that they also have the opportunity to participate in several tenders. By extension, they also win more tenders.
“For us, the tender market is extremely important. That's why we rely on tools that allow us to work even better with tender processes,” says Patricia Patoka, bid manager at Lyreco Norway.
With Cobrief on the team, Lyreco can now respond to more tenders than before. With Cobrief, they have also automated up to 50 per cent of item picking.
“We can spend more time on more qualitative assessments and respond to more tenders. We have regular meetings where we review the status of what we are working on, and then new requests for tenders are constantly coming in. Now we can work with even more people at the same time, deliver more, work more to meet customer needs, and win more,” says Patricia Patoka.
Patoka is part of the team at Lyreco working on tender processes. Together with her colleague Bjørn Ove Asprem, she says that it is not uncommon for the team to work with a double-digit number of tenders in parallel, where the public market makes up a large part.
“Public companies are stable customers, and if we win a contract, it can run for four years. It gives us predictability and long-term vision,” says Bjørn Ove Asprem.
Lyreco is one of the world's leading providers of products and services for the workplace. In Norway, Lyreco had sales of almost NOK 2 billion in 2024.
With 21 stores around the country, many people can associate Lyreco with traditional shops for office supplies. But the major engine of the company's Norwegian operations is the corporate market — and deliveries to the public sector.
At the Norwegian head office of the French-owned family group, there is a separate team that only works with tender processes. Public tenders account for the lion's share of this.
These are specialists who know both the regulations and the customers — and who have one clear goal: to win as many contracts as possible.
“We deliver to companies, municipalities and county councils all over the country. It can be anything from writing books and pens to cleaning products, office furniture or coffee solutions. All it takes to make a workplace or business work,” says Patricia Patoka.
The road to a signed contract is a long one. Winning tenders is about far more than price.
For each competition, Lyreco must put together comprehensive offers in which they not only showcase products and prices, but also document environmental measures, delivery capacity, quality and level of service.
The advantage of these contracts is that they are stable and long-term -- often four years. At the same time, it makes the complexity greater. You need to do a thorough risk analysis. A lot can happen in terms of suppliers, price developments and more during the contract period of several years.
At the same time, it is not always easy to free up time in a hectic everyday life to do this
the job as thoroughly as they always want. With Cobrief, on the other hand, time is freed up.
Each tender often contains between 150 and 1000 product lines to be linked against Lyreco's products and prices.
“It's a huge job to pick the right items and put them into the formats the client requires,” says Asprem.
This process was previously manual and time-consuming. Everything had to be matched and documented by hand -- and that took valuable time away from more strategic assessments. In order to streamline the tendering process and ensure higher quality, Lyreco adopted Cobrief in the summer of 2024.
“We don't have to spend hours recreating work we've done in the past. It saves us a lot of time and allows us to spend our energy on what really counts: the strategy and how to win the tender,” adds Asprem.
See available tenders for office supplies.
With Cobrief on the team, Lyreco can now respond to more tenders than before. In the past, the team had to make hard priorities and often opt out of competitions. Perhaps there were tenders they could have won, but overall workload made it a priority away.
“Now we can more quickly make an initial assessment and see if a tender is relevant or not. We also get a more accurate price indication early in the process,” says Patoka.
For Lyreco, technology and innovative solutions — of which Cobrief is an example — are part of a larger strategy to grow the business further.
“Tender contracts are stable and relatively long-term. In addition, we see an increasingly strong environmental focus in the tenders, which suits us well since we are actively working on sustainability. With Cobrief, we get both more time and higher quality of our responses — this strengthens us in the competition,” says Asprem.
Both he and Patoka are convinced that smart use of AI will be crucial going forward.
We need to use the tools we have. If we don't, we're suddenly two steps behind our competitors. Now we have a tool that gives us a solid advantage,” Patoka says.
For businesses that want to save time creating new revenue.
Audun Wigum Arbo
The savings potential for Lyreco has been enormous by using AI in product picking,” says Co-founder and Head of AI at Cobrief, Audun Wigum Arbo.
Not only can Lyreco now make the actual picking of goods to be handed in faster - they can also much earlier know the actual value of the contracts they are assessing.
“Already they save hundreds of hours, and can focus on strategy and quality — when the manual repetitive tasks are automated with Cobrief, they can both respond to more tenders and deliver better tenders,” says Arbo.