Two-year project aims to update and automate all of the group’s processes through an integrated approach and to support its growth
Infor, the industry cloud company, announced that Foodex Group, a Japanese food importer and distributor, has selected Infor CloudSuite Distribution Enterprise, a cloud ERP platform with prebuilt capabilities for food and beverage distributors. Foodex Group has chosen a “One Infor” approach, entrusting the vendor with the entire project through a mission of consulting, support and services delivered in SaaS mode throughout the project.
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Foodex was created in Paris in 1992 by a team of gastronomy enthusiasts who wanted to share the treasures of Japanese cuisine with European consumers. Over the years, Foodex has expanded in Europe (notably between 2001 and 2019) by creating or acquiring distribution subsidiaries. At the same time, Foodex was acquired in 2010 by the Japanese group Takara Shuzô International, the leader and historical producer of saké in Japan, and opened a tasting and training space in Paris in 2015, the Atelier du Saké. Since 2018, Foodex has also expanded its export activities with deliveries throughout Europe, constantly growing and hiring new staff. The group’s 350 employees now supply more than 10,000 customers with more than 2,500 references in line with market trends and needs: restaurants, grocery shops and agribusinesses specialising in Japanese, Asian and fusion food.
Adeline Colinet, Foodex’s IT project director, says: “Having worked for years in a Microsoft environment, we had planned to remain consistent with our initial choices. However, meeting the Infor team and discovering a solution that is entirely dedicated to our business in terms of functionality, led us to reconsider our position.”
Multi-site, multi-company, multi-currency and multi-lingual, Infor’s CloudSuite, covers the main needs of large international food distributors as standard, from omnichannel sales and order management, through purchasing, inventory and supply management, financial management, and associated analytical reporting with the implementation of the Infor Birst BI module.
“The functional richness of the solution, its standard adaptation to our business specificities, its fully integrated approach within a single interface, as well as its advantages in terms of agility, scalability and speed of deployment, were particularly attractive to us,” Colinet continues. “Deployed in a multi-tenant cloud environment — running on Amazon Web Services — will allow us to outsource our maintenance and upgrade processes to Infor’s teams, allowing our users to focus on higher value-added tasks.”
Selected Foodex key users, assisted by a team of Infor consultants, meticulously evaluated the solution in approximately 10 workshops that were organized during a 6-month evaluation period. Foodex management made a final decision for Infor CloudSuite Distribution Enterprise at the end of 2021. At the same time, Infor’s management team has become the sponsor and guarantor of the success of the project, by engaging three of its executive managers at the highest level. While a project team is being set up at Foodex, the solution is expected to be rolled out in two stages beginning in April 2022.
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Frédéric Russo, Infor SVP for international sales, concludes: “The excellent collaboration between our teams and those of Foodex from the start of the project was a real factor in accelerating their decision to trust us. Our knowledge of the sector, our international multi-country and multi-site approach based on a single solution available on AWS in the multi-tenant cloud, as well as our ability to harmonise and implement processes for reporting results, subsidiary by subsidiary, in order to consolidate and optimise the budget development plan, all made the difference.”
