MP Hygiene Transforms its Supply Chain

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Infor®, the industry cloud company, today announced that MP hygiene, the largest French manufacturer of pure wadding paper with the Origine France Garantie® label, has just completed a migration project by opting for the latest version of its supply chain management solution. The objective is to bring to its customers the same quality of service as a professional logistician. This new step responds to the strong development of the manufacturer’s activities and the scaling up of its logistics system.

Infor WMS warehouse management solution enables companies to manage the operations of their distribution centres globally. The solution combines advanced warehousing functionality with highly configurable options, integrated workforce, production, task and inventory management, and 3D visualization in a single, intuitive solution that reduces process complexity and improves operational execution.

Emeric Guillermain, supply chain director at MP hygiene, says: “Already an Infor customer since 2016, this migration project was initiated in 2020, in the middle of the Covid period, when we were recording significant growth in our orders. It was therefore conceived as a new project because it involved overhauling all of our processes, based on an industrial approach which, in our opinion, was not yet fully completed. To do this, we called on the logistics expert SNS France, which has been with us from the outset in all stages of implementation and development of our supply chain system.”

Founded in 1865, Etablissements Miribel (then dedicated to the recovery of waste for the textile and paper industry) became MP hygiene in 1992. Today, MP hygiene is the largest French manufacturer of pure cotton wiping paper with the Origine France Garantie® label, as well as nonwoven wipes, soaps and solutions for hand hygiene in the workplace (24,000 litres of soap and 100,000 litres of hydroalcoholic gel manufactured per day and 40,000 tonnes of paper wipes per year). MP hygiène thus offers a range of environmentally friendly products that it exports to 76 countries on six continents. For this purpose, the company has five warehouses (including four production sites and one operating site with a total surface area of 65,700 square metres).

“The main reason for our initial choice in 2016 was the ability of Infor’s solution to integrate our goods flows with our production, which was a prerequisite that no other player in the market met at the time,” Guillermain explains. “Then, the Covid-19 health crisis challenged our ability to accelerate our manufacturing and delivery capacities, and we once again approached SNS France to see how we could evolve our system and gain even greater speed and flexibility.”

Richard Thomas, associate director at SNS France and responsible for the project, says: “MP Hygiene had acquired a good knowledge of Infor’s solution and a certain dexterity in terms of best practices. The migration to a more recent version of the solution was therefore a natural choice, which however required a review of their processes, both in terms of manufacturing and storage.”

Today, while MP hygiene’s activity continues to grow and despite the number of forklift drivers remaining unchanged, the paper manufacturer has significantly reduced its error rate in terms of data entry and references (from 2.5% to 0.23% of lines in preparation) and gained in reliability and speed when preparing orders and delivery. Thus, batch management has been refined, thanks to the automatic integration of use-by dates and mandatory product specifications.

In addition, a module for managing the SSCC (Serial Shipping Container Code), an international standard for identifying parcels and pallets, has been implemented for better management of goods flows and automation of logistics operations.

Finally, the workforce management functionality of the Infor WMS solution has been deployed for better management of warehouse resources — this makes it possible to identify the time spent by a picker on an order — as well as many other statistics on logistics resources.

Guillermain continues: “We are particularly satisfied with the contribution of this ‘HR’ tool, which has enabled us to be more efficient in managing our numerous product references and associated orders but has also allowed us to improve our customer service approach. This real added value, which is based on the professionalization of our logistics services, will soon be completed by acquiring semi-automatic storage systems during 2023 and by launching studies on AGV equipment (self-guided vehicle), which we will connect to our WMS thanks to an automated control module.

Olivier Leroux, channel manager at Infor, concludes: “The involvement of MP hygiene’s teams in developing their logistics system, combined with the quality of our WMS offer, which is recognised as one of the best on the market*, and the professionalism of our partner SNS France, are the main keys to the success of this long-term project.”

* Infor is ranked among the Leaders in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ 2022 for Warehouse Management Systems.

Photos courtesy of MP hygiene