Vallen is a distributor of indirect materials including metalworking and MROP products. It operates in a differentiated market with robust demand for the outsourcing of the supply chain for indirect materials, the success of which is underpinned by an innovative technology-driven model.
The company started as an on-premise Infor customer in Australia.
Andrew Bennett, CEO, Vallen – Asia, noted that the Infor solution backed then was heavily modified to support the company’s Australian business. It became apparent that this approached limited the company’s growth in Asia-Pacific.
“We also had to deal with the whole cycle of upgrades, which became just too hard with the customization and cost prohibitions, so upgrades got delayed and never happened,” he added.
Catalyst for change
Bennett recalled that when the company experienced a ‘huge growth spike’ five years ago, it took them years to digest the significance. “We missed a tremendous market opportunity because our platform, systems and capabilities were not robust enough to scale quickly and support the demand for our solutions and services.
“We wanted a performance asset that will help us drive the business, that aligns to our business goals of having the right platform to achieve what we want in the market with our customers,” he continued.
Staying on course
Fast forward to the present, Vallen has rolled out Infor CloudSuite Distribution Enterprise solution across four countries and 15 locations in Asia to better manage the complexities of owning and managing inventory.
Bennett said they chose to stay with Infor because its team was familiar and comfortable with Infor M3. This minimises the pain of chain management. He also understood that CloudSuite was more than an ERP as it included business analytics, e-Commerce, and offered integration to other Infor solutions.
The company is evaluating the warehouse management capabilities of Infor WMS.
The process claims to have reduced TCO by 30% while achieving increased visibility, agility, and innovation across the company. It has also created an additional revenue stream with the launch of its e-commerce business.
The company is expecting to grow at a CAGR of 25% over the next five years.
