SocrateCloud
Case Study
B
MONTE BIANCO
Industry
Discrete manufacturing
(production of napkins, toilet
paper, paper handkerchiefs and
paper towels).
Monte Bianco – short
description
Monte Bianco, the largest
Romanian producer of tissue
paper products, was founded in
1994, in Targoviste. The
company's portfolio includes
three strong brands (Puff, Best
and Fiore), but also own brands
for various partners. At the end of
2010, Monte Bianco ranked first
in Romania for napkins, handkerchiefs, paper towels and HoReCa
products.
The Challenge
Replacing the old ERP system in
order to support the company’s
growth and long term sales
objectives.
The Solution
Monte Bianco has chosen the
open source ERP solution from
BITSoftware, the evaluation and
decision to buy SocrateCloud
was taken after analyzing several
offers on the market. After the
preliminary decision, a pilot
program was initiated, in order to
validate the SocrateCloud
functionality.
The Results
With SocrateCloud, Monte Bianco
reduced the reporting time and
improved the operational
performance of the company,
leading to a customer increase of
8% and almost 10% increase in
the annual turnover.
MONTE BIANCO - the largest Romanian producer of
napkins and paper handkerchiefs has increased its
turnover with almost 10% by using SocrateCloud
Brief company description
S.C. MONTE BIANCO S.A. was founded in
1994, in Targoviste, having as main activities
the paper processing in order to obtain
sanitary products for single use. Over the
time, the company's development strategy
has been successful, now Monte Bianco is a
major player for the single use paper
products market, ranking first at the
conventional categories of tissue paper
products - napkins, toilet paper, kitchen
towels and paper handkerchiefs - with a
market share of 20%. The company's
portfolio includes three strong brands (Puff,
Best and Fiore), and own brands for various
partners, such as Metro Quality (for Metro
Cash&Carry Romania), Clever (for Billa
Romania), McDonalds and Tarom.
If at the beginning of activity, Monte Bianco
sold its products only through local
distributors, since 1997, it started to
colaborate with the major stores chains
developed in Romania, the first of them
being Metro Cash & Carry, with the store
located in Otopeni. Currently, Monte Bianco
colaborates with all major supermarket and
hypermarket chains in Romania, as well as
with an extensive network of local and
regional distributors.
Also in terms of investments, Monte Bianco
achieved its strategic objectives. The
company invested in increasing and
modernizing the production capacity of the
converting sector and installed the paper
reels production lines to provide the
necessary raw materials for the converting
sector. Through this program, the company
aims to diversify the products range, to
increase the productivity and to reduce the
manufacturing costs and purchasing
expenses, to better manage the raw
materials production and transformation
sectors and, last but not least, to increase its
turnover.
Monte Bianco has about 200 employees, 150
products, over 700 customers and suppliers
across the country and a turnover of 15
million Euro.
The Challenge
The accelerated growth of the company led
to an increase of processed data volume and
to a continuous diversification of data types,
leading to a complex data matrix required for
analysis.
All these imposed an upgrade operation
from a simple management and accounting
software used by Monte Bianco at that time
to a complex ERP system able to handle a
large number of data and provide accurate
information in real time, in order to support
the company’s growth and its sales
objectives.
„When we implemented our first ERP system
we had between five- six hundred monthly
transactions and nearly 100 employees.
When we reached 1500-2000 monthly
transactions, the old ERP system became
useless and we had to think to a new
solution”, said Dan Savu, Planning Manager
at Monte Bianco.
The Solution
Once the decision of purchasing a new ERP
was taken, Monte Bianco began evaluating a
number of ERP solutions, and decided that
the functionality of “traditional” proprietary
ERP solutions didn’t meet their needs.
Because the company used already several
open source programs, they expanded their
search, considering SocrateCloud, the ERP &
CRM solution from BITSoftware, a good
alternative. After the preliminary decision, a
SocrateCloud
“We can say that, by
definition, any ERP/CRM
system is primarily
designed to improve and
optimize the business
processes. At the
beginning, any
additional information
represents a major
advantage on decisional
level, and also on
economical level. Along
with increasing the
volume of data and
available information,
the way of screening,
sorting and aggregating
data became extremely
important, in order to
obtain maximum
performance. And here
SocrateCloud helped us
to be always one step
ahead of competition.”
pilot program was initiated, in order to
validate the functionality of the system and
the way in which it suits to business
processes across the organization. „At that
time, we analyzed all the ERP solutions
available on the market. We had to choose
between four or five ERP solutions and the
final decision of implementing SocrateCloud
was based on two aspects. First, BITSoftware
came with a solution that had the best price
/functionality ratio, and it was also the only
one supplier who helped us to clarify our
needs and requirements. Second,
BITSoftware proposed us an ERP system, with
a low cost of ownership, a flexible system
that allows us to modify, adapt and extend
the solution quickly and easily“, said Dan
Savu, Planning Manager at Monte Bianco.
The implementing process was quite fast, the
implementation began in the first days of
November 2007, and by January 1st, 2008,
the system was fully functional. Beside the
standard SocrateCloud functionality, for
Monte Bianco, BITSoftware developed also
new components such as Fleet Management
and an integration with Hand Helds.
Currently, Monte Bianco uses SocrateCloud
in order to automate the purchasing
processes (from requisition to payment), to
Case Study
manage the inventory (from receipts and
shipments to warehouse transfers and
inventory), to manage sales, accounting and
financial and payments. „I estimate that we
are using at this moment about 70% of the
SocrateCloud Standard Edition functionality.
Now we are trying to identify new
functionalities of the system and analyze the
necessity of migration to higher versions of
the application", said Dan Savu.
The Results
With SocrateCloud, Monte Bianco reduced
the reporting time and enhanced operational
performance of the company, allowing an
accurate tracking of customers and suppliers,
leading to an increase of 8% in the number
of clients and almost 10% in annual turnover.
Also, the availability of data regarding stocks
led to an increase in inventory turnover by
12%.
In the future, Monte Bianco wishes to
maintain the company’s growth, increase the
product offering, quality and market share.
SocrateCloud, the ERP & CRM solution from
BITSoftware helped until now and will help
also in the future to achieve all these
objectives.
Dan Savu
Planning Manager - Monte
Bianco
BITSoftware SRL, 4 Zambilelor St., Brașov, Romania, Phone: +40 268 314446, Fax: +40 268 314447
E-mail: office@bitsoftware.ro, www.bitsoftware.eu