Jacquet Metal Services chooses Maarch RM for its launch

Jacquet Metal Services is a company based in the Lyon area (Saint-Priest) with subsidiaries in numerous countries (Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Portugal, and Poland), positioning itself as one of the leading European distributors of specialty steels, with annual revenue of €1.8 billion.

Current situation

Following the example of Chorus in France, but on a larger scale, Italy made full digitization of invoices mandatory across its entire B2B economy as of January 1, 2019. Since January 1, 2019, all companies have had to send their invoices to the SDI (Sistema di Interscambio), which records them and takes care of forwarding them to the recipient.

We needed an archiving solution to reliably keep records of what had been sent to the Italian tax authorities, in case of a dispute.

So, for its Italian subsidiary, but also to anticipate upcoming European obligations and regulations on digitization, Jacquet Metal Services chose an SAE with probative value that could be deployed quickly and easily across all of its entities.

Project timeline

Maarch RM was implemented downstream of JAC, an ERP developed in-house by Jacquet Metal Services, maintained and updated for more than 20 years. This single-database, multilingual, multi-company ERP, which runs in Chrome, is used by nearly 1,900 employees.

This project required only three months of work and support to give the JMS teams maximum autonomy over deploying the solution and overseeing its functional operation, while meeting the production deliverable expected in January 2019.

This allowed JMS to build, on Maarch RM, a version management mechanism for quotes produced by its German subsidiary — something that was not possible with the old system.

Three storage arrays were set up to guarantee the well-known « Y-write » mechanism required by the standard, with close to 25,000 documents fed into this centralized system every week — a figure that is growing fast, driven in particular by the rapid rollout across subsidiaries and the gradual integration of the dozen or so document types identified.

Thanks to their strict deadlines and their strong grasp of the project’s stakes, go-live was achieved within the set timeframe. Their agile way of working and their involvement made it easier to meet deadlines, deliver on expectations, and handle feedback and adjustments throughout the project.

An engaged client

Jacquet Metal Services has strong in-house expertise. Fans of « home-grown » solutions, Free Software, and open source, their engineers evaluated Maarch RM independently using the resources published by Maarch: Docker images, user and administrator documentation, installation procedures, and source code. They then called on Maarch’s experts to validate their choices and to advise them on the business and regulatory aspects of electronic archiving, before going on to build a group-wide vision.

With the ultimate goal of deploying Maarch RM across all of the company’s subsidiaries and all of the document types identified, Jacquet Metal Services is today a client under an exceptional maintenance arrangement — autonomous and highly involved in the technical contribution to the Maarch RM solution.