A historic company (founded in 1905), Fleury Michon is a Vendée (6 production sites) and family player in the agri-food industry with a turnover of 795 million euros. The industrial brand, “the second most purchased brand in France”, also has international sites.
In addition to the sale of food products, the group also carries out catering activities in hospitals, delivery of meal trays to companies and marketing of prepared meals for airlines.
From multi-ERP to a single, cloud ERP
At the IT level, Fleury Michon has an IT department of 55 people. And it is currently carrying out a migration project. The company is in fact switching from a multi-ERP world (sales, finance, production and subsidiaries) to a single ERP in the cloud.
Many of these application building blocks deployed on-premise are described as obsolete. Since 2020, IS modernization has been underway to unify ERP functions within a single software package: Dynamics 365.
“The real challenge, beyond the technical aspects, was to harmonize all of our group processes, but also to simplify by adopting standards. The aim is also to have an up-to-date solution. This is why we opted for a cloud ERP,” explains Vincent Gaboriau, director of the Fleury Michon ERP skills center.
The modernization of the ERP also meets regulatory requirements, particularly in terms of dematerialization of invoices. The overhaul of the ERP bricks, however, has impacts on the Data side.
80% of data flows to be reviewed
“Moving from several ERPs to just one required us to review 80% of our flows. Additionally, our internal ETL and EAI were unable to interface with cloud software. It was therefore essential to completely review our data management model,” he explains during feedback during the Business & Decision Data & AI Morning.
The project is thus part of the transition from essentially on-premises IT to a hybrid model. Fleury Michon therefore sought and integrated a new ETL supplier, again with a desire for unification.
The data flow processing solution had to meet all of the company’s use cases. Among its selection criteria, Fleury Michon also identified the catalog of existing connectors, operation in a hybrid environment and the simplicity of the administration interface.
The group deployed Informatica’s cloud platform to manage the data management of its operations. The deployment is gradual and the application now has around ten users, developers – trained in e-learning.
Belt and suspender to prevent cloud overruns
90% of flows are already processed via Informatica. Regarding the ERP, the commerce and finance lot was committed at the beginning of 2023. The Paso brand in Canada also migrated to this lot between September and October.
The next step will concern a first production site in February 2024. The other sites will follow until 2025. To manage its flows between on-prem and cloud, the IT department has also implemented a FinOps approach. Thanks to prior flow mapping, it was able to establish an estimate of its consumption.
“We who came from the world of on-premises and licensing, this problem was not easy to address. Fear remains about Opex,” recognizes Vincent Gaboriau. To prevent excesses, Fleury Michon chose a high range and initially oversized the Informatica platform – and subscribed to an option to protect against excess.
“This allowed us to secure ourselves,” adds the IT executive. Only a third of the capacity is consumed, but other flows are expected as the ERP migration continues. “Our transformation project is not finished and the next stage of deployment on production will significantly consume the available envelope.”