Carpet Court turns data into insights with Oracle Cloud

Carpet Court is the largest flooring retailer in Australia, with more than 200 stores. The company specializes in an extensive range of carpets, blinds, rugs, timber, laminate, vinyl, and hybrid flooring solutions. The company runs a 100% franchisee network model, holding about 15% market share. Today, Carpet Court is clocking $475 million in retail dollars.

The company was processing masses of information across 160,000 supply chain invoices, representing about $200 million in purchases. But it saw a huge gap in how data was being used for decision-making.

For example, the company was purchasing about 45,000 products a year, but didn’t have enough detailed visibility into what they were buying to make critical decisions. Carpet Court could see how much it was buying from a supplier but not across color, weight, and dimensions. This lack of clarity impacted the speed and quality of product decisions. Data was scattered across platforms, making it difficult to glean insights.

The finance and IT teams decided to set up a scanning solution from IBM to start reading data at a more granular level, which integrated directly to the company’s on-premises JD Edwards ERP. They also set up a data warehouse in AWS and Power-BI for reporting. All of Carpet Court’s critical applications were operating from different infrastructures.

“We had a vision of where we were going with data and performance management, however, with each move we made, it was clear that our hybrid infrastructure was becoming more fragmentated and complicated, and ultimately was unable to keep up with our growth plans,” says Mark Hogan, CFO of Carpet Court.

Hogan realized he’d have to make some long-term decisions with his IT infrastructure. He needed to ensure that both his application stack and infrastructure could evolve with the business over the next 5 to 10 years. This included assessing whether to move off of JD Edwards altogether.

Carpet Court decided to move the data warehouse, the IBM-based scanning solution, and JD Edwards to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

After evaluating AWS, the decision to move to OCI hinged significantly on the cost, visibility, and control of those dollars. For a team of 35, getting visibility and transparency into costs was crucial, and could be achieved only from a system that wasn’t challenging to manage. 

With Oracle APEX, a low code application development framework within Oracle Database Cloud Service and on OCI, Carpet Court now has a complete end-to-end testing and development environment—at a significantly lower price compared to AWS. 

The end-to-end development environment is enabling rapid DevTest and deployment of key initiatives, with reduced overall risk to business operations.

After moving to OCI, Carpet Court has cut costs by 40%. It has provided the company with cost visibility, control, and transparency. At the same time, it has also infused flexibility to make informed decisions quickly and cost-effectively.

“I now have a first-class infrastructure that I can make a lot of different decisions about. For example, we can stick in a web server and we can give direct internet access into JD Edwards. That opens up different worlds and different possibilities for where and how we work, which are important options to have in these uncertain times,” says Hogan.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has also brought stability to Carpet Court and increased the speed of capturing information, structuring it, and gleaning insights from it. For instance, the company can collect data from individual invoices to gather information about the style, color, and weight of the carpet a customer purchased, its dimensions, and so on. These insights help the company make more informed decisions, leading to reduced costs, less waste, and increased profitability.

“What is next is how Carpet Court makes the members’ interactions with us as efficient as possible. Get the right data in the right spot, for insight, for action, for profit. These are not complex ideas, but without the right infrastructure in place it can be challenging,” says Hogan.

He adds that JD Edwards’s ability to integrate these solutions has encouraged him to continue using it for the next 5 to 10 years because it's solid and robust.

“I'm now layering on other services that I'm providing to the members over the next six months. We’ll eventually transition other operations to OCI, and then we will be 100% OCI,” says Hogan.