Leading French manufacturer of quality riding saddles chooses Infor CloudSuite, a modern and scalable ERP solution designed for production and rental management
Infor, the industry cloud company, announced that LIM Group (Leather in Motion) has chosen its Infor CloudSuite, an ERP system designed for manufacturers, distributors and rental companies.
LIM Group was created in 2013 through the merger of CWD and Devoucoux, two of the brands in the Butet Group. LIM Group, which has 630 employees, designs, manufactures and distributes high-quality saddles for, among others, about a hundred of the world’s top 250 riders. Labelled as a “Living Heritage Company,” the brands of the LIM Group are recognised for their exceptional know-how. The group is present in 12 countries and has a strong presence in the Nouvelle Aquitaine region in France. To closely meet the expectations of its customers, LIM Group relies on a combination of innovation and know-how, as well as on the mastery of all functions: from design to distribution, including manufacturing. Today, the company is supported by Bpifrance, a French organization for the financing and development of companies, to allow the development of new products and the reinforcement of its production capacities.
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Brice Cuenca, LIM Group’s head of information systems and e-commerce, says: “LIM Group is made up of a collection of entities, 15 subsidiaries in total, all of which interact strongly on a daily basis. However, with 70% of our business being exported — notably to Germany, Canada and the United States — we did not have the right solution to support our development, both in terms of functional coverage and in terms of a single repository and traceability, all of which are necessary factors for optimising the performance of our various activities.”
LIM Group has 12 manufacturing and after-sales service workshops, and the group controls the entire production of high-quality made-to-measure saddles, from the cutting of the leather to its processing, right up to the delivery of the finished product, using no intermediaries. It also produces and distributes riding equipment: 150 product lines and thousands of size/colour combinations. Additionally, LIM Group is developing a trade in business for second-hand saddles, which creates a high-potential circular economy activity, and has just launched a health activity with the marketing of connected devices for monitoring the well-being of horses and riders.
“Our digital transformation project started in 2017 following a scoping study that enabled us to identify 10 or so issues to progress and see how and in what way an ERP solution could respond to them, in part or in full,” Cuenca explained. “After an evaluation that proved positive in almost all cases, the project was relaunched a few years later, on the basis of a call for tenders that brought together seven vendors and systems integrators. Then, the COVID crisis delayed our decision again. Ultimately, we chose the integrator Authentic, and then the Infor solution in March 2021.”
In addition to managing production via Infor M3 — the ERP on which Infor’s CloudSuite is based — it was the solution’s ability to manage the rental and distribution of saddles, as well as the associated service and maintenance activities, that led to this choice. Testimonials from other Infor customers also made the difference when compared to more traditional production management solutions.
In addition, as the saddler has many in-house software solutions that are maintained in-house, it wanted to streamline and integrate all of these applications, which a solution like M3 allows via the creation of application programming interfaces (APIs).
The Infor solution will include Infor Factory Track, a complete production automation solution that supports warehouse mobility and traceability, while providing tools for activity and time tracking.
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The deployment is planned to go live in July 2022 in a on-premises environment and will initially be aimed at the production and administration functions (excluding the sales function, which has its own tool that will be interfaced to the Infor ERP) for around 100 users in Europe. It will then be extended at the end of 2022 to the United States for around 50 additional employees.
Fabrice Caumette, Authentic Group director of delivery, says: “We are very proud to accompany LIM Group, a great French company with strong values and renowned know-how, in the implementation of Infor CloudSuite. The project is of great scope as once the manufacturing sites in France and Morocco are up and running, the scope will extend to the distribution subsidiaries around the world.”
Cuenca concludes: “Because of our history, we had significant legacy technology, with a lot of specific in-house developments to rationalise. Thanks to the functional richness and scalability of the Infor CloudSuite solution, Authentic and Infor have convinced us of their ability to support us over the long term, particularly in terms of our strategic ambitions, which are above all to develop our services activities.”
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