About the company
Acquired by Bunzl in 2004, the Pierre Le Goff (PLG) Group is a leading French company in the distribution of professional products and hygiene equipment. PLG has nearly 1,300 employees, including approximately 600 sales staff members who respond to the needs of nearly 200,000 customers. ISO 9001:2008 certified, PLG has gained its leading position by remaining true to its core values of customer satisfaction, know-how, quality, and working closely with its customers. To learn more, visit www.groupepierrelegoff.com.

Defining the strategy
When Bunzl acquired PLG in 2004, PLG consisted of 12 companies that were using seven different proprietary management systems. Following the decision to consolidate all of these solutions into a single system, PLG determined in 2005 that Infor® M3 (which was then called Lawson Movex) would best meet its needs. The organization’s goal was to use Infor M3 to help it establish an identity, momentum, and common processes throughout all of its companies. To accomplish this, the organization initiated a project that would encompass nearly all of its management functions, including financial management, purchasing, sales, inventory management, and distribution management.

With more than 30,000 items to be reclassified, cross-checked, and then re-integrated—all while PLG continued to handle more than one million orders per year, supplying sectors such as hospitality, food, health, waste services, and local government—the project initially struggled to get under way.

When the organization’s new CIO, Pascal Leroy, arrived in 2008, he re-established the project’s momentum by setting up dedicated teams, establishing a steering committee, and designating “key users”—all with the mission to implement a strategy for deploying the solution in the following 18 months (at the rate of 1 implementation every 2 months).

Between 2008 and 2010, 35 staff members (including 5 who were dedicated specifically to training) deployed Infor M3 with a dual approach: horizontally for the planning of each project, and vertically for their implementation. This was in accordance with the philosophy PLG defined for carrying out this project: “Think globally, act locally.”