Food/Beverage

Software applications that streamline and automate business processes throughout the supply chain to improve planning, optimise inventory levels, reduce costs, and respond quickly to changes in customer and supplier demand.

Foodex Group opts for Infor as Part of Global IT Overhaul

Infor, the industry cloud company, today announced that Foodex Group, a Japanese food importer and distributor, has selected Infor CloudSuite Distribution Enterprise, a cloud-ERP platform with pre-built capabilities for food and beverage distributors. At the same time, Foodex Group has chosen a ‘One Infor’ approach, entrusting the company with the entire project through a mission of consulting, support and services delivered in SaaS mode throughout the project.

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 Sake 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 or agribusinesses specialising in Japanese, Asian or 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.

Adeline Colinet continues: “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. Deployed in a multi-tenant cloud environment – running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) – 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 key users of Foodex, assisted by a team of Infor consultants, meticulously evaluated the solution in approximately 10 workshops that were organized during a six month evaluation period. Foodex Management has 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.

Frédéric Russo, Infor’s 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.”

To find out more about Infor’s solutions for the food industry:      https://www.infor.com/industries/distribution