Midsona standardizes systems to grow health market leadership
CASE STUDY
The Swedish health food and personal care company Midsona is driven to become one of Europe's market leaders in health and well-being. Through developing its current brands and acquiring new ones, the company is well on its way to realizing its vision. This rapid growth, however, makes it challenging to run the business efficiently.
“With five ERPs in place across the group, we faced a great deal of unnecessary complexity,” explains Christoffer Filippini, the IS/IT Manager for Midsona. It quickly became clear that Midsona needed a centralized platform if it was to cut licensing costs, reduce reliance on external consultants, and accelerate operations. Tasked with consolidating its five disparate ERP systems into one standardized platform, the company decided to move to Infor® technology in the cloud.
At a glance
Headquarters
Malmö, Sweden
Industry
Infor Product
Infor CloudSuite® Food & Beverage
Partner
DXC Technology
Website
With Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage, our common business platform will make it easier, faster, and more cost-effective to bring new acquisitions on board as we continue our drive to grow.
Filippini offered an example of the issues that separate ERP systems created: “We had several different platforms with no integration, which meant that the same product appeared under different SKU references throughout the group, resulting in long transaction times.” The key to the problem was the lack of integration between the existing systems. “No common processes for finance, purchasing, logistics, manufacturing, customer orders, quality, and forecasting made the decision to standardize on one ERP platform an obvious one—especially as we continue to acquire new companies,” according to Filippini.
Relying on a solid foundation
Infor M3, which is the foundation for Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage, was already in use at Midsona in Denmark. After completing a thorough review of the market, Midsona decided to stay with Infor due to the competitive total cost of ownership and because they already had proven Infor expertise within the Danish Midsona companies. Contributing to Midsona’s decision to stick with Infor was the comprehensive nature of the Infor offering, tailored to Midsona’s unique needs, as well as the inclusion of Infor EPM® and Infor Factory Track®—all delivered as a service in the cloud.
Infor Gold Services partner, DXC, managed the implementation—helping Midsona to go live with Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. “Midsona is a very exciting customer to work with. We are impressed by the company’s ability to execute on its strategy by implementing a new common platform, which played a significant role in helping the company to triple its revenue,” says Jonas Nilsson, BU-manager M3 at DXC.
The deployment is a culmination of an extensive business process reengineering project that has led to the creation of a common, standardized platform throughout the Midsona group. “We used a lot of resources in the preliminary study, as it was the basis for the most important management decision in ten years. Knowledge, experience, and understanding before making any changes are worth their weight in gold,” says Lennart Svensson, Midsona’s CFO.
Business results and efficiencies
- Accelerated operations and reporting
- Reduced software license costs and reliance on external consultants
- Automated manual processes
- Standardized processes throughout the group to improve efficiency
Standardizing business operations
As Midsona continues to grow, it’s important for the business to create a standard for how new acquisitions are integrated into the company—not only when it comes to systems, but also in terms of business operations.
“Before standardizing on one platform, we lacked best practices and a strategy for how newly acquired businesses should be integrated into the group. It was ineffective, manual, expensive, and resource-intensive, without really creating any added value,” Svensson concludes.
Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage provided the means to standardizing business operations. Svensson continues, “Now that we have consolidated our business systems, we can work with similar processes across the group. This gives multiple synergies when it comes to revenue, costs, logistics, and supply chain—and we will achieve increased control, improved efficiency, and better negotiating strengths. We are now creating a clear regulatory framework for how to work within the group.”