Texen transforms its Supply Chain with ERP SAP S/4HANA and SAP EWM
The luxury and beauty packaging specialist Texen wanted an ERP system to consolidate the IT of its various sites. The SAP S/4HANA Intelligent ERP provides a global view of the company’s activities, while allowing a redesign of the processes.
Texen is a company of the French group PSB Industries specialized in the luxury and beauty packaging sector. Its customers include some of the biggest names in the sector: LVMH, L’Oréal, Chanel, etc. Texen employs nearly 1,500 people at 10 industrial sites located in Europe, Asia and the United States.
The company’s external growth strategy has resulted in a patchwork of IT solutions. No ERP was in place and each site had its own management solution. The Luxury and Beauty division of PSB Industries had to find an answer to this problem and to the obsolescence of the tools used. In order to respond to this problem, the company wanted to acquire a standard, reliable and durable ERP that would be common to all sites and capable of meeting its requirements as well as those of its customers.
« The SAP offer was selected because it provided the best answers in terms of industrial solutions, cost and ROI,” explains Franck Perot, project director. The Intelligent ERP SAP S/4HANA was chosen, as well as the warehouse management application SAP Extended Warehouse Management (SAP EWM). » And for the implementation, TeamWork was chosen. An integrator on a human scale, offering real responsiveness and capable of covering Europe, Asia and the United States.
A site-by-site deployment
PSB industries launched its SAP S/4HANA ERP project in early 2018. The project is a classic one, with the development of a core solution, deployed on a first company of the group in January 2019 (trading activity), then a second one in June 2019 (CEICA in Brion, a production site with storage). At the same time as the ERP was implemented, the organization of processes was reviewed.
Once this model was successfully tested on both sites, a deployment kit was built, then applied and run in January 2020 at the CMSI site in Attignat, near Bourg-en-Bresse. The PSB Industries and TeamWork teams are now working on the deployment at Texen’s other French sites, one every four months.
The core solution is adapted and improved according to feedback from the field. This agility allows us to better respond to customer requests and to adapt to rapid market changes (multiplication of new products, ever shorter delivery times, etc.).
A more efficient Supply Chain
It is above all on the Supply Chain that the gains were expected. The ERP SAP S/4HANA allows to have a global and consolidated vision of the Supply Chain. The SAP offer has also allowed to rethink the processes and to redefine the functions and interactions. Finally, information is fed back from the production sites to the ERP. This makes it possible to have real-time progress reports and to immediately identify any problems, such as an inventory alert.
The other gain is standardization. All the teams now work according to the same operating methods,” says Jean Sébastien Reinhart, Group Supply Chain Director. Standardization also makes it possible to use the same language and coding between all sites, which will make it easier to create synergies. “However, these processes are not fixed: the solution is continuously improved, following feedback from the field and changes in best practices in the sector.
Developments already scheduled
« The priority is to deploy the ERP with a minimum impact on site activity », recalls Franck Perot. Once the deployment is completed, the use of the advanced technologies of the SAP S/4HANA Intelligent ERP can however be considered. BI is therefore a work in progress.
Numerous transactions are carried out between all the sites of the two divisions of the PSB Industries Group (Luxury & Beauty Division – Texen and Health & Industry Division – Plastibell). A project has therefore also been launched to merge these intra-group operations (inter-company flows).
The deployment of the ERP SAP S/4HANA on Texen’s French sites should be completed in early 2021. The question of the order of deployment will then arise: international with Texen or the start of deployment for Plastibell. PSB Industries has not yet decided, but confirms that the choice of SAP S/4HANA – and TeamWork – should enable this global transformation of the group.
