How Maison Lestar encoded its supply chain into Piston and got accurate cost prices at the source for the first time.

Background: A supply chain expert with the wrong tool

Maison Le Star is a wine and spirits producer with a strong export presence. Sandrine Horru, their ERP project lead, has spent 30 years building deep expertise in supply chain: freight logistics, supplier negotiations, export compliance. She knows every flow, every margin lever, every constraint between the cellar and the customer.

The problem was never her expertise. It was that her ERP couldn't encode it.

Challenge: When the tool is too rigid, the data stops being maintained

As Maison Le Star's export operations grew in complexity, the cracks became structural. Their existing ERP handled generic workflows, but Maison Le Star's actual processes didn't fit. Freight costs had to be manually allocated across order lines, a task tedious enough that it often wasn't done correctly. Supplier rates had to be updated by hand each time they changed. Export pricing conditions lived in spreadsheets, not in the system.

The result was predictable: maintenance stopped happening. Not from negligence, but because the cost of every update was too high. The product master drifted away from reality.

"The ERP didn't understand how we work, so we managed around it." — Sandrine Horru, ERP Project Lead, Maison Le Star

With cost prices disconnected from actuals, margins became unreliable. Some SKUs appeared profitable. They weren't. Others were undervalued. Every strategic decision — which products to push on export, which clients to renegotiate, which suppliers to cut — was made without trustworthy numbers to back it.

Solution: Piston encodes the process. The data stays right automatically.

Maison Le Star chose Piston for its ability to model their actual operations, not a generic version of them. Rather than asking the team to adapt to the tool, Piston was configured around Maison Le Star's freight allocation logic, export pricing tiers, and supplier rate structures.

Four agents were deployed. The master data management agent took over continuous maintenance of cost prices, supplier rates, and logistics conditions, removing the need for manual updates entirely. The order intake agent checks every inbound order against prices, conditions, and references before it enters the system, so no misallocated line gets through. The AI quote generation agent produces quotes with correct cost bases and export rules applied from creation. And the export management agent generates customs and administrative documents automatically on every shipment, replacing a 45-minute manual process with one that takes under 5.

The core principle: data is structured and validated before it enters any operational flow. Which means the numbers downstream are real.

Impact: Decisions made on real numbers for the first time

The most immediate change was structural. With Piston maintaining the product master automatically, the team stopped managing data and started using it. Cost prices stayed current without effort. Freight charges were spread correctly across every order. Export documentation went from a time-consuming weekly burden to a background task.

On day one of onboarding, Sandrine made the first strategic pricing decision in years backed by margin data she could actually trust.

"With Piston, data is properly integrated from the start, and for the first time, I can actually trust the numbers to make decisions." — Sandrine Horru, ERP Project Lead, Maison Le Star

Industrial SMEs don't lose competitive edge from lack of expertise. They lose it because their tools force them to work around their own processes instead of inside them. Piston encodes how the business actually works, and data becomes reliable by design, not by effort.