Since 1976, the Sauermann industrial group, established in France and headquartered in Belgium, has been designing, manufacturing and marketing services and equipment, including condensate detection and removal pumps and measuring instruments dedicated to heating systems, ventilation, air conditioning, refrigeration (in English HVACR).
Since 2020, the group has been engaged in a digital transformation process, in particular by means of a cloud solution.
The strategic objective? Support and consolidate the international structure by consolidating an overall more flexible, more agile organization.
400 employees worldwide
PMI, present in Montpon-Ménesterol (24) and in Seine-et-Marne, has recently increased its expansion in the detection, measurement and control of indoor air quality, with the acquisition of the Kimo brand. Tools.
The group weighs around 80 million euros and has 12 sites and four production units. It is present in Europe, Asia and North America, and employs nearly 400 people.
Before 2020, when finalizing several company acquisitions, management decided to renew its supply processes and modernize its manufacturing. After consulting and tendering, it opted for a next-generation cloud solution to support its changes in manufacturing and end-to-end supply chain management.
A deployment in nine months
The choice fell on the QAD Adaptive ERP solution, which has become the global platform capable of synchronizing, centralizing and remotely managing the group’s various activities. Despite the crisis linked to Covid-19, the integration of the ERP (integrated management software package) and its deployment were completed on schedule in November 2020. “In just nine months”, emphasizes Stéphane Verscheur, CDO ( chief digital officer) of the Sauermann Group.
Today, more than half of the company’s employees worldwide, ie 230 people, use the QAD Adaptive ERP solution daily. The solution, installed in the cloud, has accelerated international expansion. Each entity was able to implement the solution and thus obtained a much more precise vision of the key figures for the month.
It is now possible to measure quantify and visualize the overall results more quickly. For some product lines, delivery times have been considerably shortened. And the visibility of orders has improved significantly.
Digitization and operational maturity
“Thanks in particular to this solution, we have boosted our industrial power internationally. Our ERP has become the backbone needed to connect entities together and allow them to operate as a unified group. This allows us to move towards digitalization and operational and managerial maturity in the various entities. This is the basis we were waiting for to rebuild our processes”, explains Stéphane Verscheur.
“The first field of application was to allow an exchange with the subsidiaries of the group. Without this digitization, this would have been unthinkable. »
The arrival of digital in the corporate culture has been “more than important”: “It allowed us to have stabilization in 2021 at the operational and organizational level. If we hadn’t started this project, our turnover wouldn’t have been so high. »
Change management
One of the challenges will have been change management. The company has involved employees on three continents and created a true industrial group spirit. Because an ERP in industry often stops at operations and manufacturing. Here, the teams succeeded in making the ERP Cloud solution accessible to almost all departments.
“The project with QAD was an extraordinary business project, built collaboratively with the employees,” says Stéphane Verscheur. The choice of ERP is explained by the reputation of the solution, oriented “manufacturing” and registered in the cloud.
“We don’t intend to stop there,” concludes Stéphane Verscheur. “We want to start new projects with the next operational version in 2022.”