Natura Cosméticos S/A Implements New IT Platform to Handle Nearly 110,000 Orders Daily and Maintain Double-Digit Sales Growth
 
 

Natura Cosméticos S/A Implements New IT Platform to Handle Nearly 110,000 Orders Daily and Maintain Double-Digit Sales Growth

Printer View Printer View

Natura Cosméticos S/A (Natura Cosmetics, Inc.) is Brazil’s largest manufacturer of cosmetics and beauty products, which are distributed via a direct sales model. It ranks fourth in Latin America’s beauty and hygiene industry and 13th in the world.

Natura also has a presence in Argentina, Peru, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, and France—where it operates a store and a satellite technology and research center. Its sales force includes 1.36 million consultants—1.13 million in Brazil and nearly 230,000 abroad.

To maintain double-digit sales growth—which it has attained over the last several years, including a 21% increase from 2010 to 2011—Natura needed to more efficiently integrate its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system with customized Java applications that were critical to its business. By combining Oracle WebLogic Suite 11g with Oracle WebLogic Server, Enterprise Edition, the cosmetics manufacturer ensured scalability through virtualization to handle nearly 110,000 online orders daily by internet.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Natura Cosméticos S/A

  • "With Oracle WebLogic Suite 11g, we bridged the gap between our ERP system and our sales-related applications, which support up to 110,000 orders daily. By combining Oracle WebLogic Server with Oracle Coherence, we achieved even better performance and scalability for our new IT platform by virtualizing our servers." – Mauricio Martinez, IT Architecture Assistant, Natura Cosméticos S/A

  • Integrate the manufacturer’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system with Java applications that are critical to the company’s direct sale cosmetics and beauty product business
  • Ensure efficient processing of approximately 110,000 cosmetic and beauty product orders daily to maintain the company’s double-digit annual growth rate
  • Improve performance and scalability of critical applications that support order entry from the company’s 1.36 million consultants who sell directly to customers

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Implemented Oracle WebLogic Suite 11g and Oracle WebLogic Server, Enterprise Edition to ensure a robust IT platform that integrates back-office systems with other applications critical to cosmetics sales, making it possible for the manufacturer to maintain double-digit sales growth
  • Obtained scalability to support increasing demand for the company’s cosmetics and beauty products and reduced the risk of system overload and order processing delays, which the company had previously experienced
  • Eliminated application synchronization issues that threatened the performance of the sales, operations, logistics, and IT departments by eliminating thousands of patches and interfaces between legacy systems and the company’s ERP system
  • Achieved clustering and virtualization, leading to better performance for the company’s critical systems and enabling it to support higher volumes without having to invest in more hardware
  • Streamlined IT management and maintenance, freeing the IT team time to focus on other priorities
  • Improved system performance and stability by using Oracle Service Bus and the Oracle Coherence Suite distributed memory cache to strengthen communication between critical applications (such as order entry) and the back office

Why Oracle

“We chose Oracle WebLogic products because we have used Oracle’s platforms, servers, and database for years and trust this proven infrastructure with our critical applications. Furthermore, the performance and scalability of this environment ensures a good cost-benefit ratio.” – Mauricio Martinez, IT Architecture Assistant, Natura Cosméticos S/A

Resources