FETIM GROUP should become more agile and flexible to meet the changed customer demands .
As Beerkens explained , “ We expanded into our surrounding countries with dedicated offices and logistical operations to serve our customers faster . We started building collections for different product groups that seamlessly connected to these geographically different customers , in order to make optimal use of economies of scale in our channels of distribution , and build international processes as efficiently as possible .”
About a decade ago , Beerkens took a leap into a new world of data possibilities , as he was inspired by Infor ’ s new management team , lead by Charles Phillips , Soma Somasundaram , Stephan Scholl , Lisa Pope and Kevin Samuelson , and their ‘ cloudfirst ’ direction . Beerkens said : “ Coming from an on-prem , AS400 based , home-built , highly modified platform , we realised that we needed to adapt our IT systems and environment to align with the needs of our changing , more international role . That ' s
“ AS AN ORGANISATION , WE NEED TO BE CREATIVE AND AGILE , YET STRUCTURED AND EFFICIENT IN OUR CORE PROCESSES ”
FRANS J . BEERKENS , DIRECTOR , FETIM GROUP where we got together with several different software companies ; including Infor , who offered measurable value , because they helped us become more agile , centralise our operations and become geographically independent .”
How the cloud helped with centralisation With the creation of an entire enterprise resource planning ( ERP ) cloud platform , Fetim could centralise its organisation from its headquarters in Amsterdam . After implementation of the cloud environment , as Beerkens notes , it “ made us much more plant
1919 Year founded
450 +
Number of employees
12.8mn + toilet brushes sold
85k m ² of warehouse space
31k Stock keeping units
36 Sourcing locations
independent , locally . Our offices throughout Europe could now become geographical sales offices and operations were brought back to our HQ in Amsterdam . In distribution , centralisation saves costs , offers improved flexibility and drives efficiency ”.
“ In our on-prem days , we used to have servers in data centres , bought over different years , each with different sizes and processing speeds . Our systems and application IT professionals spent most of their time on making sure these servers and networks could communicate ; they spent most of their time developing solutions ‘ around ’ MOD ’ s , etc . Then , with the introduction of Cloud , we moved from data centres to AWS clouds . The amount of data we process every single day keeps growing . In centralising we could let security
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