Vallen Poised for Business Expansion and Captures New Revenue Stream in the Cloud with Infor

Vallen operates
in a differentiated market with a robust demand for the outsourcing of the
supply chain for indirect materials, the success of which is underpinned by an
innovative technology-driven model.  In
order to maintain a high level of operational excellence and deliver on its
customer promise, whilst
ensuring flawless execution, the company has been working with
Infor as its strategic technology partner over the years to carve out a digital
roadmap that supports business growth, change management, customer
value-creation and overall customer satisfaction.

A responsive
business model to capture market opportunity for Vallen

“Five years
ago, Vallen went through a huge growth spike. It took us years to digest it. We
missed a tremendous market opportunity because our platform, systems and
capabilities were not robust enough to scale quickly and support the demand for
our solutions and services,” said Andrew Bennett, CEO, Vallen – Asia. “With
Infor CloudSuite Distribution Enterprise, we will be better poised to
capitalize on those market opportunities in a way that doesn’t require us to
stop.  The business is able to scale
quickly and effectively as it’s not resource-intensive, and we’re already
seeing the results.  We run bespoke integrated
supply customer programs for our customers, and we are now more robust and
efficient in our service delivery because of the Infor technology and platform.
The first couple of programs that have launched witnessed seamless customer onboarding
and enhanced automation. Ultimately, we want to achieve scalable growth with
Infor’s partnership and innovation. This will be a true measure of success for
us.”

Vallen’s digital strategy for growth

Vallen started its journey with
Infor being an on-premise customer.  “On-premise we were heavily modified and supported out of our
Australian business,” says Bennett.  This
was not ideal as the nature of the Asia Pacific business is very different from
Australia’s. “We weren’t in control of our own destiny in terms of having the
system work the way we wanted it to support our business. We also had to deal
with the whole cycle of upgrades, which became just too hard with the
customization and cost prohibitions, so upgrades got delayed and never happened.”

“Single-tenant
was only a stepping stone to get us to multi-tenant because at the end of the
day, we wanted a performance asset that will help us drive the business, that
aligns to our business goals of having the right platform to achieve what we
want in the market with our customers,” Bennett shared.

Why
Infor?

Bennett said that they had
selected Infor for the upgrade because of the continuity it enabled. “Our team
are familiar and comfortable with Infor M3, so change management was less.
Secondly, we understood and agree with the vision that Infor had put forward
with CloudSuite, which isn’t just ERP but an all-encompassing solution – business
analytics, e-Commerce, and now we’re also evaluating warehouse management
(Infor WMS) capabilities as well. It’s an ecosystem that we could invest in and
build up on as we scale the business. This aligns with our company growth
plans.”

The third reason was the
extensibility feature that Infor offered. 
Vallen had targeted to go for a vanilla version of ERP. On the
multi-tenant cloud, it is able to take advantage of auto-updates to the latest
versions.  A pre-condition for leveraging
Infor’s extensibility platform is to be as vanilla as possible and the organization
has chosen to change a few business processes by doing so, but Bennett notes,
“It’s a good time for us to do it. It’s a good foundational thing to do.”

Business
outcomes and e-Commerce new revenue stream

Apart
from enabling scalable growth, the pivot from using an in-house shared service
centre in the early days to a fully SaaS model today has enabled a TCO savings
of 30% for Vallen.  Dedicated IT support
cost is kept to a minimum with a lean IT team of only two to three to support
the company across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and China.  “In the SaaS model, we really rely on Infor
to provide us that support in a multi-tenant environment  optimized for AWS for ERP and all those
connected solutions – this ensures we’re deriving full value from the Infor applications
purpose-built for our business.  That
leaves us to focus on our core competency.”

Productivity
has increased with the ability to automate and streamline much more of the
business using BI that is closely integrated with the Infor CloudSuite
Distribution Enterprise solution. 
“Whether it be our finance team for month-end reporting, or different
financial reports that took many hours to create for different stakeholders – these
can all be automated through workflows now and help us digitize paper processes
and be more efficient — be they customer orders, quotations or purchase order
approvals,” says Bennett.

Harnessing
SaaS technology to create an additional revenue stream in the new e-Commerce
platform is a big plus and aligns with the strategic intent of Vallen’s digital
plan for growth.  The company’s integrated
e-Commerce platform allows seamless management and ease of overall
configuration for the onboarding of new customers and managing new business
opportunities, without having to deal with the complexities of other
third-party applications.  “It allows us
to be “always on” and to be highly-responsive to scaling business needs and
customer wants,” says Bennett.

Going
forward, Vallen will assess how to derive further value from its digital investments
and augmenting its value proposition to customers, whether it be on the
e-Commerce front or digital portals for customers, or integration with
third-party systems such as vending machines, made possible by the openness of
Infor’s digital platform. 

“Infor
is proud to be a strategic business partner for Vallen all these years.  We are excited to continue supporting them in
their digital agenda and leadership as they grow and transform their business,”
said Fabio Tiviti, senior vice president & general manager, Infor ASEAN
& India.  “We are confident that we can
help drive innovation for our customers with our Infor CloudSuite solutions
that are purpose-built for specific industries and finely-tuned in the cloud.”

Media Contact:

Phyllis Tan

Infor Asia Pacific

phyllis.tan@infor.com

+65 9799 9133