Infor®, the industry cloud company, today announced that LNS — a manufacturer of a wide range of products designed to optimize the performance, productivity and profitability of manufacturers operating in the machine-tool sector — has opted to deploy Infor M3 CloudSuite. Designed for manufacturers and distributors of products and after-sales services, this enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers the flexibility required to manage mixed and complex value chains. This project is part of a wider digital transformation of the company and aims to achieve greater standardization at a global level to improve the quality of work, optimize access to information and improve collaboration between users.
Credit: LNS
"We have been an Infor customer for more than 15 years and initiated our first project in 2005 on a limited scope, which at the time concerned only Switzerland,” explains Stéphane Englert, CIO of LNS. “Since then, we have continued to evolve our system with the deployment of our ERP across various sites and the completion, in 2019, of a first stage of migration to a single-tenant cloud environment. Today, as we prepare to switch to the multi-tenant cloud, our objective is to rewrite our processes entirely to simplify, standardize and industrialize them, and thus promote collaboration and exchange between our employees worldwide.”
Founded 50 years ago in Switzerland and acquired in 2022 by the Swedish Storskogen Group, LNS is the world leader in peripherals and services for machine tools. With innovation as its DNA, LNS has continuously expanded its offering year after year with new product lines to meet the needs of all its customers. These include bar feed systems (200,000 units installed worldwide), chip management systems (175,000 units installed worldwide), air filtration systems and cutting fluid management systems. At the same time, its global organization, with headquarters in Orvin, Switzerland, has been adjusted to be as close as possible to its customers and, today, LNS has 16 sites, including 9 production sites in Europe, the United States and Asia (China, Taiwan and Japan) and two sales sites supported by a network of subsidiaries and exclusive agents. The company is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and intends to take this occasion to a new level with the launch of this new digital transformation project.
"The final choice of Infor was made in 2011, when we migrated from our American site, which was equipped with another ERP solution that we had considered as a possible alternative,” explains Christophe Pouillot, LNS head of information systems. “But the multinational and multilingual dimension of the Infor M3 solution was much more efficient, and we therefore continued to integrate our various sites at a rate of one per year, to Germany which was started in January.”
Today, Infor M3 CloudSuite is the backbone of LNS' information system and manages most of its main functions (purchasing, production, logistics, sales and finance). At the same time, the company has developed, often at the request of its users, some 30 internal applications designed to simplify their work. Some of these are connected to Infor's solution, and LNS has also developed interfaces that link it to its partners, notably transporters, with the aim of preparing for the forthcoming regulatory transition to electronic invoicing.
"If 2019 was a technical migration stage to a single-tenant cloud, this new stage of switching to the public cloud represents much more, with real strategic challenges of 're-engineering' our processes and a profound transformation of our organization and our collaborative working methods," Pouillot continued.
While the first presentations of the multi-tenant cloud environment that will be deployed and maintained by Infor are scheduled for next April, the LNS IT team intends to keep a close eye on the technology between now and then. The aim is to discover the new tools offered as standard in Infor's CloudSuite and gradually replace the specific applications in place with pre-integrated modules, while simultaneously streamlining the multiple processes deployed.
A series of laboratory workshops and technical-functional training sessions will be organised internally to define with Infor consultants the new applications to be developed under the Infor OS cloud platform.
Englert concludes: "We have high expectations of this project, the main objective of which is to have common tools interfaced with our different websites, in order to facilitate the exchange of data between our different sites and employees. With go-live scheduled for October 2024, we intend to support each employee as closely as possible to their expectations and offer them a new, more efficient, more fun and high value-added working ecosystem."
Learn more about Infor M3 CloudSuite: www.infor.com/solutions/erp/m3