Lancel Bags a Cloud Upgrade with Infor

Famous French leather goods manufacturer frees itself from legacy IT systems and upgrades on-premises ERP to Infor CloudSuite Fashion

RUEIL-MALMAISON, France – May 26, 2021 – Infor, the industry cloud company, today announced that the famous French luxury leather goods manufacturer Lancel has chosen to implement Infor CloudSuite Fashion, an ERP solution dedicated specifically to the fashion, textile and luxury industries, as part of a project to migrate and streamline its IT systems.

Learn more about Infor CloudSuite Fashion

The Lancel family business was founded in Paris in 1876. Specializing in the manufacture and sale of accessories related to the use of tobacco, which was becoming increasingly popular among women, the company naturally made its first leather goods, namely bags, to store these accessories. For nearly a century, Lancel continually innovated and filed numerous patents that allowed the brand to become a part of the French luxury goods industry and then, in the 1980s, an international brand. Integrated into the prestigious Swiss group Richemont in 1997, it was finally acquired in 2018 by the Italian group Piquadro.

As part of this latest acquisition, the challenge of migrating Lancel's IT infrastructure out of the Richemont network prompted the new CIO to completely rethink the existing model, which was heterogeneous and had changed little since 2011. "I joined Lancel at the end of 2019 with the mission, in 24 months, to migrate the legacy systems — three ERPs: Infor M3, Cegid Y2 and SAP — out of the Richemont Group's infrastructure and networks," says Michael Joncour, CIO at Lancel. "This was an organic, precise and perilous mission, especially in the middle of the COVID-19 period, which had a strong impact on the project."

The urgency of the situation led the CIO to capitalize on one of the existing solutions. An in-depth study of the Infor M3 ERP solution found that, although it had been installed in 2011, it was very functionally rich and it met the manufacturer's business requirements. The plan was to upgrade this robust system dedicated to the fashion and luxury goods industry, and it was only natural that Lancel chose the latest multi-tenant cloud SaaS option in order to migrate and upgrade Infor M3 to Infor CloudSuite Fashion as quickly as possible, without creating any disruption in current processes.

"The functional fit of the solution and its numerous standards dedicated to our industry; the prestigious customer references — in particular Zadig&Voltaire; the lack of time and the team available and the support provided by Infor's partner, CGI, which mastered the solution and the Lancel environment, all weighed heavily in the balance when choosing Infor," Joncour confirmed. "We decided to streamline the environment using the latest version of Infor CloudSuite Fashion, which runs in the AWS cloud, and added the Infor Birst BI tool for analytics and kept our Cegid Y2 tool interfaced with the Infor solution.”

Today, the project is on track with the schedule as envisioned before the pandemic began. "The project started in March 2021 and the objective is to have migrated all of Lancel's infrastructure and data by December 31, 2021," said Olivier Scheidegger, director of consulting services at CGI, who is working with Lancel and the Infor teams on the project. “The choice of the cloud in this context is particularly astute in that it offers agility and a speed of deployment that is unmatched by traditional installations."

For Infor, the project validates the vertical industry approach and investments made in the cloud with AWS. "The popularity of our Infor CloudSuite Fashion solution with prestigious fashion brands in France and internationally is now more than ever a reality," said Philippe Maillet, Infor SMB & channel sales director in France. "With this project, carried out jointly with Lancel and our partner CGI, we are once again demonstrating our ability to rapidly transform a heterogeneous legacy environment into a homogeneous infrastructure for digital that centralizes both application solutions and data. In less than one year, despite the pandemic, Lancel will be able to benefit from a dedicated, centralized and secure business solution. In addition, it will be able to continually benefit from the regular updates to its CloudSuite Fashion solution thanks to its open architecture and interface it with other applications, in particular with a PLM solution, as it plans to do."

About Lancel
Lancel, a French leather goods company, was founded in 1876. A family-owned group, it has taken care, since its origins, to give Parisian life a mischievous and innovative air at the same time, the timeless seal of what appears to the world as the "French touch." Integrated into the prestigious Swiss group Richemont in 1997, it was bought in 2018 by the Italian group Piquadro. Today, Lancel continues to embrace its era by following a long tradition whose common thread, as feminine as it is Parisian, can only be translated as "French Légèreté." For more information: www.lancel.com/fr_en/

About CGI
Founded in 1976, CGI is among the largest independent IT and business consulting services firms in the world. With 77,000 consultants and other professionals across the globe, CGI delivers an end-to-end portfolio of capabilities, from strategic IT and business consulting to systems integration, managed IT and business process services and intellectual property solutions. CGI works with clients through a local relationship model complemented by a global delivery network that helps clients digitally transform their organizations and accelerate results. CGI Fiscal 2020 reported revenue is C$12.16 billion. CGI shares are listed on the TSX (GIB.A) and the NYSE (GIB). Learn more at www.cgi.com

For more information

Richard Moore
Infor PR EMEA
Richard.moore@infor.com
+447976111243