COVAP has chosen Infor’s CloudSuite Distribution Enterprise ERP solution to provide a modern, scalable management system. The aim is to employ best practices in the trade via a fully integrated, efficient tool for its 181 employees and 530 members.
Infor, the industry cloud company, has announced that COVAP, a plumbers’ purchasing cooperative based in the Vendée region of France, has opted for Infor CloudSuite Distribution Enterprise. This multi-tenant cloud ERP platform includes functionalities tailored for the distribution sector. Key features support managing over-the-counter sales, branch mobility for receipts and deliveries, and internal logistics activities with portable terminals and barcode scanning.
Launched in 2022, the strategic project’s goal is to enhance service and responsiveness for COVAP members. Concurrently, it seeks to improve the daily autonomy, productivity, and satisfaction of COVAP’s teams and to foster its development. Utilizing a public cloud, COVAP will benefit from automatic updates, which eliminate the need for major migration projects, allowing the cooperative to concentrate on its core business and standardize processes on trading industry best practices.
COVAP, established in 1982 by approximately 60 plumbing artisans, now boasts 530 craftspeople shareholders across nine regions and operates six agencies with a 14,000-square-meter storage platform, 20 lorries and an automatic warehouse. It provides four showrooms showcasing 15,000 stock items and 150,000 listed products for members and their end-customers.
Stéphane Droulin, IT Manager at COVAP, said: “We wanted to replace our business management system which was becoming obsolete and hampering our development, with a true ERP trading system. We consulted several software vendors on the market, including Infor, which had an excellent knowledge of our business and a reputation in functional terms. The duo of Infor and its partner Authentic, led by Charles Fanton and Olivier Fournaud, was quickly put in place, and they demonstrated their experience in our business, particularly in their ability to support us in this strategic project to overhaul our processes to bring them in line with market best practices. The functional aspect and the scalability of the solution through regular updates were also decisive factors in our choice.”
Infor’s solution will replace interconnected software to standardize and simplify systems, providing a single source of truth. It will encompass all operations, including reporting and EDM, and will interface with other third-party solutions, such as the web portal for members.
Fabrice Caumette, Delivery Director at Authentic, commented: “Distribution is at the heart of our expertise. We will work closely with COVAP’s functional teams to ensure they take ownership of the solution and make this project successful. We organized several scoping workshops, which gave us a clear picture of their business expectations, particularly regarding warehouse mobility and omnichannel capabilities.”
Jérôme Ternois, Infor Senior Sales Director for France, concluded: “We are delighted to count among our customers a company like COVAP, a cooperative founded on principles and values that resonate with us. Deployed in a multi-tenant public cloud environment hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS), our CloudSuite should enable them to accelerate their development while getting their teams involved in a new management dynamic that will benefit everyone, particularly in terms of speed of order processing, traceability, support and efficiency in after-sales service, flexibility of financial transactions and monitoring of supplier performance.”
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