Charles & Alice works with VISEO on its IT project

Established since 1976 in the heart of the orchards in South-East France (Drôme and Vaucluse regions), the Charles & Alice group is specialized in the transformation of fruits and vegetables. Its objective is to offer fruit desserts and tasty recipes made with selected ingredients. For this reason, the group wants to ensure the quality of its products and the respect of the environment, and is involved in the French organic sector.

Charles & Alice decided to create an IT convergence project on SAP

It was to sustain the group’s growth and to provide transversality in its process and move from a logic based on entity to a group functioning one and optimally cover all its processes, that's why the Charles & Alice Group decided to create an IT convergence project on SAP.

The collaboration between VISEO and Charles & Alice began in July 2014 with an audit of their SAP solution and then extended to other services of consulting and maintenance

“When we chose VISEO we were looking for a partner to fully assist us in our development and work with us on the long run. The first step was to adapt SAP to our core occupation and implement it in our plants, which is what we are doing at the moment. The next step for VISEO will be to help us with the evolution we will have to go through in order to better use SAP”, explains Dominique Sagne, HRM general secretary at Charles & Alice.

With an old version of SAP ECC and facing efficiency and responding-time issues, Charles & Alice committed in March 2015 with VISEO to a migration project to SAP HANA to answer these short term problematics and dispose of a new tool allowing them to consider the implementation of new functionalities.

“We’ve now been working with VISEO for a few years and I can say that the outcomes are really positives on many aspects: first on the past steps that we faced, the version’s change, the implementation of SAP on a facility that was not equipped, state Dominique. Everything went well or seems to be going well for the transaction to SAP HANA.”

The group satisfied by this migration considers the following steps

“What is really valuable is the team spirit in which everything happens, with the collaborators that are very available and listening with a good knowledge of the constraints that imply our trade, which is not very complicated as we make compote for mass distribution and the market of the out of-home food channel, we do not have complex products but we do have some constraints and specificities” explain Dominique Sagne.

With no big effort of rewriting the existing programs, the time-responses have been improved. On the end-user side, the new installed version is very well welcomed. According to a satisfaction study conduct to our key users and sector managers, we observe that they are all mostly satisfied by the migration.

“We have been working with VISEO’s collaborators that, either knew, or were able to quickly adapt to our trade and quickly used the same language of our collaborators, and that is a very important point, especially for the improvement phase of our utilization, in which we will be in 2017, to be able to push the tool to its maximum capacity, explains Dominique Sagne. It is for this phase that we really need the VISEO collaborators to discuss with the Charles & Alice ones, to speak the same “language” and use the same terminology so that they easily understand each other to work on the optimization of SAP utilization” he concludes.