Immersed in a world that is almost totally computerised and flooded with data, companies, in building a high-performance information system, must today take up two major and related challenges: that of backup and that of security.

While many feel that they are generally well protected against the new risks that have emerged, the specialists' findings remain: few organisations have put in place good practices and taken advantage of the possibilities offered by the cloud to meet the various requirements.
With the astronomical amounts of data circulating today, companies of all sizes are developing their strategies based on
on the solutions available and implement the most appropriate ones for their policy and constraints. In general, French companies are proving to be
This is in contrast to other European countries where the technique is much more widespread. However, IaaS (Infrastructure As A Service) has some serious arguments to defend itself. For fear of abandoning certain levers
and to outsource a critical part of their development to external providers, solutions with trade-offs in responsibility and accountability will be considered.
In general, IT management solutions are in vogue: PaaS (Platform As A Service) or SaaS (Solution As A Service). A long-time partner, Sonia Dendani, a speaker from Oodrive, sheds light on the current approaches being taken to best meet a demand that is constantly evolving, but which remains marked by a certain amount of mistrust. She believes that there are two ambitions that must now be combined: to offer collaborative solutions that encourage the sharing of information, but with real data protection and security levers. "Today, we are dealing with an issue of trust. Companies are concerned to know exactly where their data is located and whether it is sufficiently protected," she insists. At Oodrive, we place this trust at the centre, through our various certifications, which enables us to build real relationships with partners and customers.

As a symbol of this sufficient difficulty, the list of laggards in cloud adoption remains long, while companies
are making efforts to improve usage and develop solutions adapted to the competitive context. Is this a typically French reluctance? For Julien Leroy, pre-sales manager at Arrow, this problem particularly affects companies in France. "This hostility to the cloud
comes from the fear of companies that they will no longer be able to control the information system because it is no longer "just next door" but also because many were bypassing
security systems to be able to operate the infrastructure remotely".

L’article JALIX Insight – Comment concilier cloud et sécurité du système d’information ? est apparu en premier sur Jalix SI PME Ile de France, Hauts de France, Rhône-Alpes.

The French leader in private concierge services since 2008, John Paul has become an expert in Premium customer relations by offering its white label service to companies. With more than 300 employees worldwide, including 200 in France, John Paul is constantly seeking to exceed every expectation of its members, through knowledge of the customer and anticipation of their needs.

With more than 15 nationalities of concierges and a global network of privileged partners, John Paul is able to ensure the same quality of service everywhere in the world, through its 8 subsidiaries, present in 8 countries.

In addition to the expertise of its employees, John Paul's know-how is also based on technological tools, designed specifically to meet the requirements of the business. A total of 15 employees are dedicated to the information system and innovative tools to enable John Paul to create a personalised and close relationship with its members.

Issue

With a growth of more than 100 % over the last three years, John Paul's technological tools were no longer adapted to meet the needs of the company and its customers, in terms of service quality and follow-up. John Paul's positioning is closely linked to technology and its ability to offer excellent and personalised service, especially in an international business.

Solution / Implementation

In the first quarter of 2014, in order to support the internationalisation and development of John Paul, two main projects emerged: - the implementation of a Dynamics NAV ERP, via Cloud Azure, a powerful solution designed for international use and - the implementation of Office 365, for optimised information sharing and better collaboration.

After a call for tenders in the summer of 2014, John Paul chose the integrator Jalix. From the beginning of the 2014 school year, Jalix set up a precise timetable for the successful integration of the two Microsoft solutions.

Configured in SaaS mode, Dynamics NAV ERP has enabled John Paul to link its CRM tool to Microsoft's tool to give it complete visibility in real time of its sales, accounting and financial situation.

Advantages and benefits

In production since the last quarter of 2014, these tools allow John Paul to both have an agile information system and to combine its know-how with technological performance, with the aim of offering the best possible customer relations service, everywhere in the world.

Dynamics NAV provides John Paul with visibility into analytical details that enable him to work on controlling, including summary tools and the ability to easily implement complementary Excel files.

" Thanks to Microsoft ERP, we have all the elements we need, more easily and quickly accessible than before. Jalix's expertise in the solution allowed us to save time so that we could quickly get to grips with it. "explains Fabien Dawidowicz, Finance and HR Director of John Paul. " However, as the possibilities of the tool are numerous, we are not yet totally autonomous and the assistance and quality of Jalix's daily follow-up are precious to us ".

Dynamics NAV, coupled with John Paul's CRM, enables the automatic centralisation of invoicing data and thus facilitates the management of several hundred monthly flows linked to the concierge activity. The medium-term objective is to connect all of the group's entities (currently eight on four continents) on the same platform, and thus to collect, integrate and centralise all member information in real time in order to offer its clients the most efficient tailor-made concierge service and financial management.

" Deployed throughout the group, our CRM allows us to manage our marketing campaigns, to carry out affinity and behavioural profiling and to analyse the results of our privileges programme in order to create, maintain and optimise the relationship with our members. Dynamics Nav will allow us to extend this chain of services to the payment process by integrating perfectly with our tools and processes in all our entities. "complete David Amsellem, Chairman of John Paul.

Used by all employees, Office 365 provides the best collaboration tools in terms of messaging and collaborative portal.

" This tool enables collaborative customer management, allows employees to access their email from anywhere, while providing them with the ability to securely share their files. Office 365 is truly the tool that has allowed us to maintain our agility in a phase of sustained growth and development "explains David Amsellem, Chairman of John Paul.

Thanks to Jalix's expertise, the leader in private concierge services has benefited from a global support package that takes into account the hosting of applications and the integration of business tools.

In 2015, John Paul plans to continue strengthening its technological tools with the deployment of Lync instant messaging and the OneDrive cloud storage solution. In late 2015, early 2016, the leading private concierge company also aims to link its banking network to Microsoft Dynamics NAV and the dematerialisation of its purchasing.

About Jalix (@JalixServices)

Founded in 2006, Jalix is an integrator and consultant specialising in the fields of infrastructure, ERP, CRM, BI and project management. It addresses the needs of SMEs in terms of audit/diagnosis, strategic consulting, development, implementation, training, migration and management, as well as complete or partial outsourcing of the information system. This comprehensive offer, reinforced by various partnerships, enables Jalix to be the preferred partner for SMEs in the management of their IS: virtualisation, storage, IS relocation, global security policy, backup plan and implementation of DRP.

L’article Le système d’information de John Paul devient agile grâce aux outils Microsoft et à l’expertise de Jalix est apparu en premier sur Jalix SI PME Ile de France, Hauts de France, Rhône-Alpes.

Patrick Charlier - Administrative and Financial Manager, Cutera France

Some companies are launching in Asia from France. Others are doing the same... by setting up in France from abroad. What they all have in common is that they are taking advantage of the facilities offered by the Cloud to enable these developments far from their historical homeland.

Who are Cutera and Cutera France?

Cutera is an American specialist in lasers for medical use, particularly in the fields of dermatology and aesthetics. This is a very specialised and innovative universe, in which only a few companies are positioned and where all practitioners carefully compare the quality of competing products. This closed environment means that there is a strong dynamic to attack new specialities, such as tattoo removal - until now anecdotal - and new national markets. Historically, Cutera relied on resellers to ensure its presence throughout the world. More recently, in France and Japan, the company has decided to create real subsidiaries. The objective is to have an excellent reactivity, a more specialized presence and a strong capacity of adaptation. In France alone, it is necessary to ensure the company's ability to act at no less than 60 professional events each year. Initially created with just one person, Cutera France has grown rapidly and now employs 10 people with varied profiles(1).

What makes you different from other French SMEs?

Cutera's subsidiary strategy is to develop local activities and recruitment. The challenge is not so different from that of French companies that take advantage of their digital evolution to set up internationally. The aim is to be able to support strong growth in activities. In this respect, we are faced with the same constraints as other SMEs: resources, time, equipment, etc. Until I was recruited in November 2013, accounting matters were also assigned to an external firm, as many small French companies do. The main difference for Cutera France is that our links with the US are extremely strong. For example, we do not have a French general manager / subsidiary director, unlike many subsidiaries. Similarly, I report directly to the CFO who is based in Brisbane, California. So we have to combine our day-to-day reality as an SME with the monitoring and expectations of a much larger structure, listed on the Nasdaq since 2004... and distant.

Is this where the Cloud comes in?

With our direct management entirely based in the United States, the Cloud is indeed a key to ensuring our growth. Controlling the development of an activity abroad requires, among other things, permanent and very precise monitoring and reporting. This made outsourcing accounting very difficult.

How have you changed in concrete terms?

I was recruited to take over the administrative, accounting and financial aspects. Our main challenge, always from the perspective of a growing SME, was to move quickly. The pressure to transform our day-to-day operations was very high: we had to take over the accounts and set up our new link with the United States, and the ad-hoc management tool, between January and February 2014. Most of the ERPs did not cover our cost accounting needs accurately enough and others were really too heavy and imposing for our dynamics. The Cloud approach with Microsoft Dynamics NAV provided by Jalix, allowed us to settle the matter in less than a month.

Was an "express" deployment the only issue?

The nature of our management, as an SME with links to California, brought many other issues. First of all, we needed a multilingual approach for our tool, with an automatic "translation" of French accounting specificities into elements that could be taken into account by an American financial director. All this while remaining very simple to use, to support daily monitoring. The tool also had to be able to combine the French chart of accounts with the US GAAP accounts. In this respect, the Cloud challenge was also to be able to overcome the time difference (9 hours with the West Coast of the United States) which usually hinders communication by telephone and e-mail between remote employees. My Controller Europe and Japan can consult NAV in English and get answers during her day.
Finally, in a very pragmatic way for our development, the Cloud frees us from everything related to back-up, servers and maintenance in our premises in Lieusaint (Seine-et-Marne). It's a real facilitator for an SME of our size: our IT staff can devote themselves to more important tasks. The company continued the process by unveiling, a quarter later, a storage and sharing function also in the Cloud.

What about your daily work?

The usage is completely transparent: I have a laptop and just need an internet connection to do my work. This has been a great source of comfort in the months since I arrived, when I often had to work from home as well. Even today, it is easy for me to start my day very early from home, then take my children to school or to the leisure centre, before joining the company. It's a great flexibility for a small company like ours. The person in charge of preparing customer invoices in NAV also has this flexibility through the cloud: urgent customer invoices can be done without being in the office at the same time. All of these advantages appealed to both Cutera US and Cutera France. Our search for software/vendor lasted from mid-November to mid-February, only the month of January had to be processed twice, in the old software of the accounting firm in Paris La Défense and in Microsoft Dynamics NAV, through Jalix. If we had had to do the same, 5 or 10 years ago, without the Cloud, we would have had to do at least twice as much work, extend the implementation time, perhaps work with two software packages in parallel, choose and install a specific server for backups... And between the research and the deployment of the tool itself, I think that at least a year would have passed in the end.

(1) 3 technical profiles, 1 French sales manager, 3 sales representatives, 1 maintenance / sales administration assistant, 1 marketing manager and 1 administrative and financial manager.

CUTERA FRANCE
Activity: Cutera France is a subsidiary of the specialist in lasers for medical use, Cutera. Created in 1998, it ensures the presence of the worldwide brand on the French market and among dermatology and aesthetic professionals.
Staff: 10 employees
Turnover: €3 million (2013)
Source : Cutera FranceAZURE

L’article CUTERA France – Dynamics NAV sur Azure est apparu en premier sur Jalix SI PME Ile de France, Hauts de France, Rhône-Alpes.