Infor®, the industry cloud company, today announced that Palais des Thés, French house known for its exceptional teas, has opted for Infor CloudSuite Distribution Enterprise, a cloud-based ERP platform with features designed and developed for the food retail sector. At the same time, the retailer has chosen the Infor Factory Track module, a solution for automating and simplifying stock and production operations that manages automation in factories and warehouses, from receipt of raw materials to processing and packing to dispatch of finished products, while integrating inventory, operations planning, and the associated work and attendance times.
Launched at the beginning of 2022, this transformation project aims to provide Palais des Thés with the management system needed to support its strong growth, while moving it towards greater standardisation, and addressing major challenges of warehouse and logistics management.
Laurent Chaumont, CIO at Palais des Thés, says: "Our old ERP deployed in 2012 was no longer adapted to our new company size, while our ambition is to reach €100 million in turnover in 2026. Therefore, we wanted to upgrade our system to a more modern and scalable solution, which would allow us to move towards integrated business functionalities, using standard capabilities in the cloud.”
With 350 employees, 75 shops in France and 97 worldwide (50% franchised and 50% owned), an e-commerce site, a head office in Paris and a warehouse in the Paris region, Palais des Thés is constantly expanding to help tea lovers discover exceptional teas. Tea is the second-most drunk beverage in the world after water. Palais des Thés founder and owner defines himself as a tea seeker and travels the planet to discover the best vintages. To do this, he has developed an in-depth knowledge of the regions, terroirs and techniques and has built a deep relationship with the farmers and producers, while ensuring regular quality control over the way these harvests are produced. He has also created a tea school, which provides reference courses in the secrets of this age-old beverage and the art of tasting it.
Chaumont explains: "We launched our call for tenders in 2021 and consulted various publisher/integrator pairs among the main players in the market. The choice of Infor and its partner LTTD Consulting was made at the end of 2021 based on the obvious criteria of the functional suitability of Infor's CloudSuite to our business expectations. In addition, the possibility of interfacing this new ERP with a module entirely dedicated to the logistics function, Infor Factory Track, fully met our challenges in terms of managing supplies, stocks and order preparation.”
The experience of the LTTD Consulting teams was also decisive in the choice, in view of their expertise and their ability to support the company in redesigning its procedures to align them with a more industrialized and standardized approach, as proposed by the Infor solution.
Eventually, the solution should be interfaced with third-party solutions, such as the management of shops and the e-commerce site, which will enable the distributor to consider the difficulties linked to its multiple distribution channels and the evolution of its activities more serenely.
The company currently distributes more than 700 tonnes of tea in over 400 varieties worldwide through 70 shops, a large network of several hundred retailers, two subsidiaries in Russia and the United States, and its e-commerce site.
"Today, we are finalizing the configuration and design of the interfaces, while the solution should be deployed early next year. Between now and then, around 20 key users, representing all the company's functions, will take part in the organisation of 70 workshops and thus report on all the malfunctions and adjustments to be made," continues Chaumont.
"While the company has weathered the pandemic crisis particularly well thanks to online sales, we want to support the Palais des Thés teams as closely as possible to their needs, so that each employee can take ownership of the new system. In addition, we are supported by its general management, which participates in all the steering meetings and has positioned itself from the outset as a sponsor and guarantor of the project's success," says Jean-Christophe Prickartz, project manager at LTTD Consulting.
Philippe Maillet, Infor’s sales director for SMB & channel in France, concludes: "We are happy to count among our customers a reference like Palais des Thés, a fine brand that respects the values of this new world and has been able to withstand the difficulties of the past two years. Deployed in a multi-tenant cloud environment hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS), our CloudSuite should enable their young and dynamic teams to focus on their core business and on higher value-added tasks.
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