Holding Textile Hermès (HTH), the entity that oversees the workshops feeding the various métiers of the French luxury house, has completed a three-year industrial and digital transformation programme known as Cassiopée. Run with consultancy Citwell as project management adviser (AMOA), the initiative spanned both systems and organisation, with the explicit goal of modernising tools while rethinking operating practices and data governance across the group’s dozen subsidiaries, around 1,000 direct staff and 1,500 indirect jobs.
Why a Reset Was Needed
HTH had deployed an ERP across the group some 15 years ago, lending a degree of maturity to its processes. But growing flow complexity exposed the limits of the original setup. “The initial model was largely built around the leather goods and saddlery division, with a limited number of operations carried out on a single site. At HTH, we have complex production ranges spread across multiple companies: the system no longer reflected the reality of how we operate industrially,” explained Yann Fresco, Director of Transformation at HTH. The group ultimately retained Infor’s M3 ERP but moved to a cloud version, prioritising standard configuration to support robustness and long-term maintainability.
Sixty Business Processes Reworked
In parallel, the team revisited and simplified roughly 500 operational activities across 60 business processes. “We had proposed a change of organisational model that required a precise analysis of the impact on the workshop floor: preparation needs, workspace dimensions, evolution of operating methods,” noted Saâd Kadioui, IT partner at Citwell, stressing the attention paid to scoping, change management and training, which involved nearly 500 end-users.
A Multi-Vendor Tech Stack
Beyond the ERP overhaul, Cassiopée bundled the rollout of a Manufacturing Execution System from Aveva, a Business Intelligence layer based on Power BI and Anaplan’s planning solution. Around 110 people contributed to the programme, alongside roughly a dozen partners covering technical integration (IBM, Capgemini and others) and programme management (Wavestone), in addition to Citwell’s advisory role.
Smooth Cutover
HTH said the staged rollout secured production flows throughout the migration. “From day one, we were able to ship and invoice as normal,” Fresco noted, highlighting that the project landed on schedule and on budget. The closure of Cassiopée illustrates how heritage luxury manufacturers are quietly modernising their industrial backbone to handle increasingly complex multi-site, multi-product flows without disrupting service to demanding clients.
