Rolling out a unified ERP across very different industrial sites — a rapidly expanding plant and a young service entity exposed to regional instability — is a challenge SKF Magnetic Mechatronics (S2M) chose to take on with IFS Cloud. In an interview at the IFS booth at the Tech For Industry Show, hosted by Stéphane Merour, Team Leader Manufacturing(IFS), Eric Michot, CIO (SKF Magnetic Mechatronics) looked back at this project.

A division of the SKF group (founded in 1907, a global benchmark in ball bearings), S2M was created in 1976 — the company was celebrating its 50th anniversary at the time of this session — and became a wholly owned SKF subsidiary in 2006. It employs around 450 people across 9 countries, with 6 production sites (Canada, three in Europe, Morocco, China), for revenue of around 1.4 billion Swedish kronor (roughly €140 million). The company invests 11% of its revenue in R&D and holds 110 patents, with new filings every year.

S2M manufactures magnetic bearings: rotation happens within a magnetic field, with no friction, no lubricant and no associated maintenance. This technology enables very high speeds — some motors on magnetic bearings run up to 150,000 rpm, a performance beyond the reach of a conventional ball bearing, even a lubricated one. The absence of friction also translates into better energy efficiency: less energy is needed for the same service delivered.

S2M's application landscape reflects its history of acquisitions: a single CRM for the entire magnetics division (Salesforce), but three different ERPs depending on the production site — IFS for the French site, Infor M3 for Canada (inherited from the SKF USA/Canada organization), and another system for the Moroccan and Dubai sites. The new project aims to unify these environments around IFS Cloud, starting with the Morocco and Dubai scope.

The Moroccan site is a subcontracting legal entity for the group's two main customers, France and Canada. It currently has around 50 employees, with a target of more than 300 by the end of 2026, a new building under construction that will triple production floor space, and a shift from one to three production shifts per day.

Located in a free-trade zone, the plant competes with other manufacturers to attract and retain workers. The main challenge is therefore to standardize tasks and speed up the upskilling of new hires — on his last visit, Eric Michot noted that half of the plant's workforce consisted of new employees in training. To address this, S2M relies on the POCA connected worker tool, designed to provide a shared knowledge base and facilitate feedback loops, with a deliberately simple interface for operators whose job isn't IT management.

Created at the end of 2025, the Dubai entity has just six people, dedicated exclusively to sales and service sales, with field service engineers (FSEs) covering the region. A repair activity is planned starting in 2027. The site experienced a temporary closure of several weeks due to regional instability, with staff repatriation — a situation that suggests a significant upcoming increase in repair activity on gas and oil installations damaged in the region.

One of the project's major goals is to eliminate the administrative burden linked to exchanges between legal entities of the same group (purchase orders, sales orders, shipments), even though these exchanges add no internal value. The planned solution relies on distributed MRP: a need expressed by France or Canada would automatically be transmitted and translated into an order on the Moroccan side, triggering production, with transparent information flowing back to the requesting entities. With all entities working in the same IFS environment, requesting entities would have real-time visibility into their order's progress, right through to on-time delivery.

The project aims to build a core model applicable across the entire SKF Magnetic Mechatronics group, relying on IFS Cloud modules covering customer relationship management, sales management (with a strong project component, notably for oil & gas equipment, which is often customized for each deal), finance, human resources and skills management, service and field intervention management, industrial asset management — including assets transferred between sites belonging to different legal entities — as well as environmental reporting, as part of the emissions-reduction commitments made by the SKF group.

Another highlighted building block: the ability to generate, for every machine manufactured, a complete client dossier bringing together all certificates and traceability steps — from receipt of raw materials to subcontracting certificates, along with associated intermediate signatures. An approach similar to what's seen in the pharmaceutical industry, where every production batch has comparable document traceability.

Eric Michot explains that he deliberately chose to start this project on newer, smaller sites, where resistance to change is lower than at long-established sites — a way of proving by example that the solution works, building on the success already demonstrated day-to-day by IFS at the French site. IFS's modular approach, compared to Lego bricks, makes it possible to start quickly on a broad but shallow functional scope (order taking, purchasing, receiving, quality — deployed in Morocco in under three months), then progressively enrich the system as the site scales up and new employees join, without needing to start from scratch.

Eric Michot's account shows how a modular ERP can support the rapid growth of very different industrial sites, while laying the groundwork for a common model across an entire group: streamlining intercompany flows through distributed MRP, supporting team upskilling through a connected worker tool, and ensuring complete document traceability, essential in sectors like oil & gas.

Watch the full interview, along with the other Tech For Industry Show replays, on our dedicated page.