Elior Group’s fragmented, outdated CRM systems hindered innovation and growth, making it difficult to unify processes, scale operations, and meet evolving business needs.
All business units adopted Microsoft Dynamics 365, streamlining CRM and integrating data for scalable operations across 12 countries.
Elior Group integrated its data and processes through Microsoft Dynamics 365, facilitating expedited decision making, enhanced customer relationships, and scalable organizational growth.
The Elior Group is one of the world’s leading operators in contract catering and support services. The company operates with a simple, foundational goal for its employees—give the best every day to improve the lives of everyone. Elior achieves this by providing innovative and sustainable solutions to a wide range of clients in the business, education, healthcare, and leisure sectors. With a strong focus on culinary expertise, quality service, and customer satisfaction, Elior Group operates in 12 countries, serving millions of customers daily. A customer-centric business needs a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that provides 360-degree visibility, and in their search for an improved platform, they found that Dynamics 365 Sales fit the bill.
“With Dynamics 365 we’ve launched a global transformation aimed at streamlining our systems. The more we standardize and unify our digital assets, the more we’ll be able to scale operations, improve delivery, and strengthen capabilities across all countries.”
Eric Cuziat, Chief Information Officer, Elior Group
Eric Cuziat, Chief Information Officer of the Elior Group, supported an ambitious plan to implement a new global CRM system in a tight eight-month time span. Thanks to the skills and great coordination of his team and implementation partner, Masao, that’s exactly what happened.
Initially, Elior’s legacy Salesforce CRM was the one application he wasn’t planning on replacing, because the decade-old solution had been deployed globally and was one of the few systems in the company’s landscape deployed worldwide. However, it became clear that the version in use was outdated, highly customized, and difficult to maintain. It no longer fit Elior’s evolving needs, especially as the company sought to bridge IT systems with the business to simplify operations and align processes by business line rather than geography.
Maintaining a fragmented, country-specific CRM setup was a barrier to innovation and growth. Ensuring that the shift to a unified platform would be truly transformative, however, required a future-proof solution that could support a streamlined, business-first approach, and the ability to meet long-term strategic goals.
Dynamics 365 Sales came out on top. Aside from its flexibility and scalability, Dynamics 365 also proved to be more cost efficient. Beyond the initial savings achieved with decreased maintenance costs, Dynamics 365 enabled Elior to secure and stabilize its CRM budget for the next five years, enhancing financial clarity and predictability.
Elior was able to improve and take the lead on its projects. Eric Cuziat and Céline Mansour, Project Manager at the Elior Group, came together at the right time, the first to respond to the strategy of internalizing skills, the second to lead in a global transformation project. Céline Mansour took on her position with enthusiasm and was able to support all internal and external stakeholders in this implementation.
What really tipped the scales in favor of Dynamics 365 was that the Microsoft commitment to innovation aligned perfectly with the company’s strategic priorities, as it heavily invests in pursuing cutting-edge technology. “We needed a partner that could evolve with us and Microsoft’s technology roadmap and agility made it the right choice,” says Eric Cuziat.
At Elior, Dynamics 365 sits at the very heart of its back-office ecosystem. It’s a foundational platform that connects and supports multiple critical systems across the group.
Dynamics 365 plays a central role in managing master data, including customer information, contracts, and financial KPIs. The platform is evolving to serve as the source of truth for several core data flows. For example, an account may begin as a prospect in Dynamics 365 Sales. However, that contact only transitions into a client when the entity is registered in the accounting system. That’s why tight integration between CRM, finance, and other functions is essential.
By positioning Dynamics 365 in this central role, Elior is not only streamlining processes; it’s preparing its ecosystem for future innovations. The ability to maintain a single, interconnected view of the customer journey from prospect to invoicing is a powerful shift that improves efficiency, data governance, and customer experience.
“We needed a partner that could evolve with us and Microsoft’s technology roadmap and agility made it the right choice.”
Eric Cuziat, Chief Information Officer, Elior Group
While the core of Elior Group’s business is culinary services, it has four other lines of business that make up roughly 25% of its annual €6 billion turnover. Professional services related to facility maintenance, urban maintenance, staffing and recruiting, and aeronautic production and inspection make up the rest of the business. At any given time, Elior is managing several tens of thousands contracts.
Today, managing those contracts and customer relationships is a lot easier. Dynamics 365 Sales is now actively used by the Sales Operations teams, with adoption continuing to grow across other functions such as the legal department. Usage is expanding within these teams as the platform’s ease of use and efficiency improvements are showcased.
In day-to-day operations, Elior uses Dynamics 365 Sales from initial lead qualification to opportunity management, transforming prospects into accounts, contacts, and active sales opportunities. The system allows teams to track opportunities throughout the entire sales process, from creation to contract negotiation, to closure and beyond.
Once a contract is signed, Dynamics 365 continues to play a central role in managing the contract lifecycle, including renegotiations, rebids, and renewals. This ensures the company can maintain strong customer relationships and stay aligned with evolving client needs.
Priority number one for Elior Group is meeting its customers’ needs, and to meet this priority, a unified customer profile is imperative. Dynamics 365 allows teams to maintain a comprehensive view of each customer across its various businesses, enabling comprehensive insights into client interactions and needs. The Operations team can track all Elior services provided to clients with Dynamics 365, providing the direct service independently from the brand, ensuring global communications across the company, and identifying satisfaction levels. The Global team made a significant change that facilitated information sharing while maintaining confidential relationships with customers. According to Céline Mansour, the purpose of the change is to boost cross-selling, emphasize added value, and improve data quality.
With Dynamics 365, Elior defined tailored solutions for each line of business—from food services to aeronautics to energy and facility management. The modular and business-focused design allows the company to better meet the specific needs of each activity while still maintaining a unified, group-wide system. With multiple business lines, cross-selling is a key strategy. Having all account data centralized in one system allows sales and operations teams to identify synergies, track business development efforts, and make informed decisions about where and how to grow client relationships.
Another major advantage is seamless integration with Microsoft 365. The integration of Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales with Outlook has transformed the way teams work, bringing intelligent suggestions, email insights, and CRM updates directly into their workflow. This integration not only boosts efficiency but also improves data accuracy and overall user satisfaction.
In the legacy system, Elior attempted to build a unified model for food services and then layer in other services like facilities. Unfortunately, that one-size-fits-all approach made the system cumbersome and frustrating for end users.
Within eight months, Elior managed to build and deploy Dynamics 365 all over the world. This accomplishment would not have been possible without the commitment of many project attendees (approximately 30 representative persons from different countries), their skills and perfect knowledge of the business, and their proximity with the final users to promote a quick adoption to meet clients’ needs.
While still early in the journey, the results so far are encouraging. Eric Cuziat sums it up this way, “With Dynamics 365 we’ve launched a global transformation aimed at streamlining our systems. The more we standardize and unify our digital assets, the more we’ll be able to scale operations, improve delivery, and strengthen capabilities across all countries.” First, the company is exploring the best ways to leverage agentic AI and Copilot usage to improve Elior employees’ daily experiences, automating some recurring and time-consuming tasks and giving them the opportunity to stay focused on the core of their business. Additionally, Elior is looking for even further simplification and streamlined processes. By simplifying its IT landscape and unifying processes, Elior is building the agility and capacity it needs to support future growth on a global scale.
Follow Microsoft