Agrale S.A. Prepares Customer Proposals 36-Times Faster with Upgraded Database in Open Source Environment
 
 

Agrale S.A. Prepares Customer Proposals 36-Times Faster with Upgraded Database in Open Source Environment

  • Oracle Customer:  Agrale S.A.
    Location:  Caxias do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
    Industry:  Industrial Manufacturing
    Employees:  1,800
    Annual Revenue:  $100 to $500 Million

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Agrale S.A. is a Brazilian company that manufactures vehicles, bus chassis, four-wheel drive vehicles, tractors, diesel engines and generators. Agrale, which has a 50-year history, maintains a presence in 30 countries. Its subsidiaries—Agrale Montadora, Agrale Argentina, Agrale Comercial, and Lintec—form part of the Francisco Stedile Group.

An Oracle customer since 1998, the company decided to upgrade to Oracle Database 11g, Standard Edition with Real Application Clusters and to incorporate Oracle Linux to improve processes and reduce processing time for business-critical information, such for costing and raw material management. This initiative enabled Agrale to better plan for new business and control back orders.

The upgrade took only 45 days and shortened, by a factor of 36, the time required to calculate product costs to strategically determine the feasibility of meeting a customer’s or prospect’s requested deadline. Specifically, Agrale reduced the time needed to send a proposal from 12 hours to 20 minutes.

In addition, the company migrated to Oracle Linux, running on Oracle Database with Oracle Real Application Clusters, to reduce licensing costs and maintenance time and improve data processing speed, availability, scalability, and security.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Agrale S.A.

  • “Our supply and raw materials calculation system directly impacts our business, as our customer response time and the ability to establish product costs depends on it. Before we upgraded to Oracle Database 11g, Standard Edition, it took 12 hours to complete a quote. We can now make information available to users in just 20 minutes without impacting other company sectors.” – Eduardo Bento Alves, IT Supervisor, Agrale S.A.

  • Ensure quick access to manufacturer’s operational costs and other raw material information for vehicle, bus chassis, four-wheel vehicles, tractors, diesel engines, and generators, helping to meet customer demands
  • Accelerate the customer-proposal generation process―which took 12 hours to complete―to make the company more competitive
  • Make available all product-line and raw-material cost information― necessary for strategic business decisions―without impacting other company processes
  • Optimize the vehicle manufacturer’s IT resources in terms of licenses and server maintenance

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Upgraded to Oracle Database 11g, Standard Edition, enhancing enterprise resource planning (ERP) processing speed and robustness, which enables Agrale to create sales proposals 36-times faster and increase the number of new business prospects
  • Reduced time to generate commercial proposals for vehicle manufacturing from 12 hours to just 20 minutes, improving agility in responding to potential and current customer requests and boosting customer satisfaction
  • Enhanced internal management of costs and raw materials, by reducing processing time for weekly costs and raw material by 25% —monitoring market dynamics without compromising other processes, thanks to Oracle Database 11g, Standard Edition’s protection from server failure and planned downtime
  • Implemented Oracle Linux and reduced licensing costs and maintenance time for Agrale’s IT staff, which now has more time to dedicate to other projects
  • Adopted Oracle Real Application Clusters to strengthen the company’s IT platform, making it more reliable and ensuring business continuity in the event of server failure

Why Oracle

“We upgraded to Oracle Database 11g, Standard Edition due to the security and reliability that the product and brand offers,” said Eduardo Bento Alves, IT supervisor, Agrale S.A. “The technology is a cornerstone for our business, and we aim to evolve with Oracle to ensure speed and availability. Since we operate in an extremely competitive market, we consider these tools to be a great advantage. We are certain that other products on the market would not meet our needs as well as Oracle.”

Implementation Process

Agrale completed the upgrade to Oracle Database 11g, Standard Edition in 45 days and completed the migration to Oracle Linux in just one weekend.

“This renovation enabled us to gain processing speed and was an extremely positive experience, as we completed it without complications and within our deadline,” Alves said.

Partner

“BEG Support assisted us in the upgrade to Oracle Database 11g, Standard Edition and the migration to Oracle Linux, which have delivered important business benefits to our company. BEG Support conducted a survey of our environment and developed a detailed implementation plan. It executed the entire project transparently and within the stipulated deadline, as the company has highly capable professionals. We have total confidence in the work done by the BEG Support team,” Alves said.

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