Automotive Supplier Bontaz Accelerates its Transformation with Infor CloudSuite Automotive

Infor, the industry cloud company, announced that Bontaz Group, an automotive supplier and world leader in hydraulic functions dedicated to this industry, has chosen to implement Infor CloudSuite Automotive to support its “Phygital” transformation. Bontaz opted for a deployment in the Infor multitenant cloud, hosted by AWS, with the specific objective of doubling its annual revenue and diversifying its activities empowered by the Infor solution dedicated to the automotive sector.

Founded by Yves Bontaz in 1965 as a family business specializing in metal bar machining, the group has grown rapidly and now employs nearly 4,000 people. With more than 24 factories around the world — in France, United States, China, Brazil, India, Japan, South Korea, Czech Republic, Tunisia, Portugal and Morocco — the company is a true partner of car manufacturers for whom it develops and manufactures 180 million mechanical valves per year and 14 million solenoid valves, which are high-precision components. The quality of these products is widely recognized, and Bontaz has received awards from industry players.

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To support its growth in the framework of a 2030 project, Bontaz decided to look into replacing its in-house ERP. The company wanted to accelerate its digital transformation by integrating a modern, innovative solution, dedicated to the sector and capable of handling all the company’s complex manufacturing processes.

The group’s leadership launched a call for tenders in October 2020 and selected six vendors and solution integrators before narrowing the list to two major players, then reaching the final decision in May 2021, selecting Infor. Infor’s cloud offering was chosen as the multitenant deployment minimizes the costs and risks associated with a migration project and also reduces the internal resources mobilized at the customer’s sites. The functional richness of Infor’s solution was a key factor for this choice, as it is preconfigured at an extensive level to meet the specific needs of the automotive industry.

Jean-Marie Willot, Bontaz Group CIO, explains: “The project we have started with Infor goes far beyond the framework of a business process management tool. It aims to radically change the group’s structural organization by adding new skills to the IT teams, whose numbers have doubled and who are expected to derive maximum benefit from the solutions we provide.”

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Indeed, the Bontaz Group will optimize the organization starting 2022 in France and 2024 at the international sites. This technology upgrade with Infor is designed to help Bontaz maintain its market-leader position while diversifying its production and approaching other sectors, such as aeronautics, by providing better support for its research and development (R&D) and by rationalizing and streamlining communication between the various business lines to increase its productivity and revenues.

“Infor’s CloudSuite solution will provide us with a single view of critical data from heterogeneous sources that benefit all functions and businesses in the organization. The platform we will have at our disposal will certainly contribute to improving the organization of production itself, but also of our financial processes with a clear improvement expected in our purchasing practices, our supply chain and our distribution channels. Another crucial point for us is that Infor’s cloud offering will allow us to benefit in near real time from all version upgrades to support our growth through constant innovation integrated into the solution,” Willot says.

Laurent Jacquemain, Infor senior vice president and general manager in Southern Europe, said: “This project with Bontaz is a great opportunity for Infor to demonstrate its ability to respond accurately, quickly and efficiently to the specific business challenges and issues faced by professionals in the automotive sector. Our track record in this area – with more than 800 automotive companies among our customers worldwide – speaks for itself. But the flexibility of our approach, the proximity created with the customer, and the cloud technology hosted by our partner AWS guaranteeing high availability, security, agility and simplified integration of future applications have also contributed to position us with Bontaz as the ideal partner for this global transformation project over the long term.”

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