Terre adélice

The artisan food industry faces growing challenges: regulatory requirements, large volumes of data, and above all, intense seasonality that requires efficient management of supplier and customer relationships. For small and medium-sized artisan businesses, mastering internal processes has become a key driver of performance: freeing teams from repetitive tasks lets them focus fully on what creates value.

In this context, Terre adélice chose to orchestrate its business processes with the 3DEXPERIENCE ITEROP solution. This choice was driven by a simple belief: when used well, technology frees up teams to focus on what really matters: making excellent ice cream.

Founded in 1996, Terre adélice is much more than an ice cream maker: it’s a French ice cream maker of exceptional craftsmanship, born in the Ardèche region, celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2026. With a team of about 35 people and a workshop in Saint-Sauveur-de-Montagut, the company produces nearly 700,000 liters of 100% organic ice cream and sorbet every year, in 145 flavors.

Positioned in the premium segment, Terre adélice serves both individual customers, through its stores in many of France’s major cities, and professionals such as restaurants, organic shops, and artisan ice cream makers. What sets it apart is its rigorous craftsmanship: fresh fruit is prepared directly by the team, purées are made in-house, and everything is churned on-site.

Since 2021, Bastien Laval, President of Terre adélice, has led the company's digital transformation to meet growing challenges while preserving its artisan spirit.

Terre adélice manages a demanding level of operational complexity: 145 flavors, thousands of active customers, hundreds of suppliers, and a sales window concentrated between May and September. But as the business grew, some of its existing tools started to show their limits.

In 2022, the electronic document management solution in place no longer met the needs of the company. Archiving was not very ergonomic; searches were tedious and validation workflows were too rigid to adapt to the specificities of each department. Finding an archived document sometimes took as long as searching for it in a paper binder.

On the supplier side, Terre adélice processes several thousand invoices per year, including a large number of local producers sending handwritten or poorly standardized receipts. Only two people in charge of accounting had to manage this flow, enter it manually in the ERP, archive it and have it validated.

With hundreds of new customers each year, sales teams were collecting information through shared spreadsheets, fragmented email exchanges, and forms sent to customers. The result: incomplete data, incessant back and forth with the accounting department, forgetfulness on direct debit mandates and tensions between the different departments.

Without a central coordination tool, tracking each case was split across several people, with the risk that a step, a missing piece of information, an unsigned mandate, could fall through the cracks. This kind of oversight could delay opening an account, hurt the customer experience, or, in the worst cases, cause payment collection problems.

As a 100% organic company, Terre adélice also needs to make sure every supplier holds a valid organic certification. With hundreds of documents to track each year, each with a different expiration date, there was no structured system in place to manage this critical task.

With experience gained at large industrial groups, Bastien Laval joined Terre adélice with deep knowledge of the ITEROP solution and a clear vision of what it could bring to an artisan SME: a tool capable of orchestrating complex information flows, adaptable to any business, and rolled out step by step. He began the deployment in 2022.

The selection criteria were clear: a solution flexible enough to adapt to Terre adélice's specific needs, easy for non-technical users to learn, and scalable enough to support new processes over time. ITEROP met all these requirements.

The rollout started with the most critical processes, such as supplier invoice management, before gradually expanding to customer account creation, HR document management, organic certificate tracking, and many other areas.

The accounting team was involved from the earliest testing phases and quickly embraced the solution. The old document management system was fully replaced by a combination of ITEROP and a cloud storage tool, offering precise document search, full traceability of actions, and fine-grained access control.

To digitize documents, the office scanner is connected directly to an FTP server that ITEROP monitors every 10 to 15 minutes. As soon as a new document appears, a workflow starts automatically. An AI layer pre-fills key information from each invoice: supplier name, invoice number, date, amounts, eliminating most manual data entry.

For customer account creation, an online form is sent to prospects. The form can't be submitted until all the required information is filled in. Once validated, the workflow automatically handles sending the direct debit mandate, getting it signed by the customer, notifying accounting and sales teams, adding the customer to the email marketing tool, and creating their online ordering account. 

On customer account creation alone, the estimated time saved is about 30 minutes per file. Across the hundred new customers created each year, that adds up to over 700 hours saved annually, time the team can now put directly into business development and customer relationships.

With close to 2,000 supplier invoices a year, the time savings are just as significant, thanks to automated data entry, fewer back-and-forth exchanges, and the instant traceability that ITEROP provides, all boosted by a touch of AI.

Across supplier management as a whole, the savings are estimated at several thousand euros a year, thanks to fewer delays, fewer errors, and better tracking.

Today, Terre adélice relies on around ten operational processes in ITEROP, covering a wide range of business areas. Supplier invoice management and customer account creation form the foundation, complemented by organic certificate tracking, a key regulatory requirement for a 100% organic company, HR document management, CSR tracking, and even small-scale processes like tracking gift vouchers. Every process, however simple, helps reduce the team's mental load and makes shared information more reliable.

ITEROP's low-code approach lets Bastien Laval design new workflows himself and roll them out without complex IT development. Users only need a few minutes of training to get started. The intuitive process design makes it easy to pick up right away.

Beyond the numbers, it's the quality of everyday work that has changed. Reminders and notifications now happen automatically, no more calling a colleague to remind them of a task. Tensions between departments have eased, and information now flows smoothly, in a structured and traceable way.

Onboarding new team members, whether permanent or seasonal, has also become easier: the process is documented in the tool, the steps are clear, and reminders are automatic. Less time spent explaining things, more independence from day one.

Bastien Laval doesn't see ITEROP as a standalone solution, but as the central piece of a growing digital ecosystem, where ERP, CRM, and artificial intelligence will communicate smoothly and automatically. Several areas of development are already underway.

The next major step will be automating reminders for unpaid invoices. ITEROP will alert the sales team about overdue invoices, with the invoice automatically attached, while still leaving room for a human touch, a phone call, a personalized message, what Bastien Laval calls "keeping our human touch."

The upcoming introduction of mandatory e-invoicing in France is also seen as an opportunity to further automate the accounting chain and eliminate the last remaining manual data entry steps. Setting up a CRM will complete the picture, with 3DEXPERIENCE ITEROP coordinating between the CRM, the ERP, and business processes. With 15 to 16 active users on the platform, adoption is already well underway, and a process-driven culture is taking hold: employees are now suggesting new workflows to automate themselves, a sign that digital transformation has truly taken root.