Balthazar
About
Balthazar is a French transport consulting firm, part of the Columbus Group. The firm advises major public transport operators — including RATP and SNCF — on operations, strategy, and commercial performance.
Industry
Transport Consulting
Headquarters
Lyon & Paris, France
Group
Groupe Colombus
Related
Challenge
Balthazar wins work by responding to tenders — the public contracts that transport operators put out to bid. The problem is volume: a huge number are published every day, and most aren't a fit. Sorting the noise to find the few worth pursuing — and judging why each one fits — was slow manual work, and good opportunities sometimes slipped by.
Solution
Forwarding Copilot built a system that does the triage automatically. Every day it reads the newly published tenders and sorts them by priority, with the reasoning written out. From a dedicated app, the team can correct any analysis and tell the agent how it should have judged it, and the system remembers. It also keeps a memory of every contract Balthazar has won, so it flags new tenders that look like past wins. Balthazar owns and runs the whole thing in-house.
Results
New tenders read and sorted by priority automatically, every day
A dedicated app to correct or rewrite any analysis — and the system learns from it
A memory of past wins that flags new tenders worth bidding on
A production platform Balthazar owns and runs in-house, building lasting internal capability
“The hard part was never the expertise. It was the sorting. Now the system reads every tender, remembers what we've won, and points us straight to the ones worth bidding on. And it's ours to keep building on.”
— Alexandre Gaillouste, Managing Partner, Balthazar
Thousands published, a handful that matter
Balthazar advises major transport operators, and a big part of its business is responding to tenders — the public contracts operators put out to bid. Win the right ones and the firm grows.
The catch is volume. A huge number of tenders are published every day, and most have nothing to do with Balthazar. Reading through them to find the few worth pursuing — and judging why each one fits — ate up consultant time that should have gone to actual advisory work. Even then, good opportunities sometimes got missed.
Triage that learns from the team
Every day the system reads the newly published tenders, sorts them by priority — high, medium or low — and writes out the reasoning, so a consultant can trust the call at a glance or push back.
Pushing back is the point. From a dedicated app, the Balthazar team can correct or rewrite any analysis and explain how the agent should have judged it. The system takes that feedback on board, so its calls get sharper the more the team uses it.
A memory across tenders
The system also remembers. It keeps a memory of the contracts Balthazar has won and compares every new tender against that history. When something lines up, it makes the connection plainly: "this looks like a deal you won before — it makes sense to bid."
That turns a pile of listings into real recommendations, grounded in Balthazar's own track record. And the coverage keeps growing — we're now connecting private tender platforms alongside the public ones, so fewer good opportunities go unseen.
Built to be owned
From the start, the goal was for Balthazar to own it. We worked through quick prototypes, proved what was useful, then built the production version — and handed it over entirely.
It runs on standard, open tools that the Balthazar team manages on its own accounts, with no dependency on us. The result isn't just a tool that saves time; it's a piece of in-house capability the firm can build on for its own clients.