Minos UX improves processes for household-maintenance manufacturer Paul Masquin

Having migrated from Minos 4.2 to Minos UX, Paul Masquin now benefits from the new ergonomics of Inetum's ERP, simplified data export, and redesigned EDI functionalities. The manufacturer of household-cleaning items now wants to automate warehouse flows.

With some 800 references and 6 million items sold each year through major retailers (80% under private label), Paul Masquin is a leader in the sweeping and household-cleaning market in France. Founded in the 1930s, the family-owned business in the Vaucluse region is known for designing and manufacturing household-maintenance products (brushes, brooms, buckets, shovels, clothes pegs, etc.) for the retail market. The company has about sixty employees and generates an annual turnover of some €15 million.

Paul Masquin rolled out Minos UX in March 2022. Inetum's logistical flow management solution is not all that new for the Courthezon-based company. They have relied on Inetum's ERP since the early 2000s, mainly to administer sales, manage marketing actions and customer agreements, introduce paperless invoices, and supervise stock. But, although the SME has since integrated the EDI (electronic data interchange) features that are all the rage in the retail sector, no further upgrades were released for the Minos 4.0 version that they had been using up till then. The resulting obsolescence put Paul Masquin's data at odds with their needs for upgrading and maintenance.

New user-interface design, data export, and an EDI overhaul

“As the company grew, there was a need to upgrade the Minos solution,” says Pascal Alex, who’s in charge of the company’s administrative affairs and IT resources. “We now want to stay as close as possible to the standards proposed by Minos UX so that we can keep abreast of upgrades in a more regular way and avoid the sudden leaps of changing to a new version.”

The Minos UX rollout is therefore a priority to meet all of the manufacturer's needs and let them benefit from the latest improvements.

An example is the new user-friendly design of the flow-management environment. Following the initial and inevitable trial and error, “users are now finding many advantages”, Pascal Alex underlines. The possibility to export data (the complexity of the previous version was an obstacle in this regard) is another aspect that Paul Masquin appreciates. And lastly, the complete overhaul of EDI features has simplified processes. “Very flexible and ideally suited to our use,” the CIO says.

Minos UX – a future foundation for workflow automation

The rollout of Minos UX has, above all, brought back the optical gun for order-picking in warehouses. “The former radio methods had been more or less abandoned by our teams because they found them too complicated and had found other ways to process data. But with Minos UX, we're back to order-picking by radio. The process has been improved, the risks of error are limited, order-pickers find it useful, and the results are there,” Pascal Alex says.

One improvement leading to another, the use of optical readers in the preparation of orders to be shipped is paving the way to a new scenario at Paul Masquin. “We want to automate stock management by extending the use of radio devices to all three of our warehouses for inbound, outbound, and internal flows, which will help to avoid empty spaces,” Pascal explains. He is counting on Minox UX to help optimise the fill ratio of their 8,000 m² of warehouse floors and the logistics chain as a whole. “The gains will be tangible,” he assures us. The project is scheduled for 2023-2024.

Integrating other Minos features

Pascal Alex does not rule out the possibility, “at a later stage”, of integrating other Minos UX features such as product-catalogue management for vendor sites, production-chain management, or supply-chain management. As for the latter, Inetum teams reintegrated the existing supply-chain management tools that the SME wanted to keep. But the ability to test Minox UX's dedicated features in real life could lead Paul Masquin to take a new look at using Inetum's ERP. “We are going to put these features into practice with our teams to check if we can eventually replace our current tools and then reinforce them with additional modules,” he foresees.

The flexibility and quality of support provided by the Inetum Supply Chain teams is something he appreciates in particular. “The assistance they gave us when implementing the project and regular progress reports allowed us to adjust various aspects of the program along the way. And the use of the ERP on test versions allowed users to learn the necessary skills progressively. We had no apprehension on 28 March when we went live,” Pascal Alex recalls. He concludes: “We are a cautious lot and we need a partner that we can rely on in the long run. That's what we've found in the Inetum teams. I hope they'll be with us for many years to come.” And we can say the same.