Cegid boosts sales by moving its fashion ERP to Oracle Cloud

Cegid is a French software company that creates business management solutions for the fashion and retail sector, as well as for human resources and talent management.

The company’s Unified Commerce platform, operated by Cegid Retail, encompasses 1,000 brands in 75 countries with 75,000 physical boutiques and ecommerce sites. The platform provides omnichannel services, streamlines merchandising, and augments the customer experience of Cegid retail’s clients.

Cegid Retail runs Orli, the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that supports the sourcing, manufacturing, logistics, stock handling, and multichannel delivery of textiles on the Unified Commerce platform. Cegid Orli remained on-premises until retailers complained they could not keep up with the investments required to benefit from the added functionality of new versions of the application.

Cegid also needed to transform its Fashion ERP solution into a more agile software-as-a-service solution to help its clients react faster to market forces and the fierce competition in the international retail sector.

Cegid selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for two principal reasons—its technical stack and technical support. First, Cegid was impressed by the data management within Oracle, including Oracle Autonomous Database, which eliminates the complexities of database administration. The company had built its retail application using the low code Oracle APEX framework and Oracle Forms, and therefore decided to run the Cegid Orli SaaS version on Oracle Database Standard Edition.

The second major reason for the choosing Oracle was the support provided by Oracle Consulting during the transition to the cloud. “We really appreciated the personalized guidance Oracle Consulting provided, from our very first discussions around cloud until our first customer went live. That for us was crucial,” says Olivier Chiono, retail product management director.

Cegid deployed the Orli ERP critical application on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with immediate success, as Cegid Retail’s clients quickly realized the cost and time savings of running their back-end processes with greater automation and performance.

Within months of go-live, Cegid experienced a sharp increase in sales both from existing clients switching to Orli SaaS and from new clients joining Cegid’s Unified Commerce platform. “It’s been a commercial success. We not only reached but greatly exceeded our targets, with twice as many customers signed up for our SaaS solution than we had planned for,” says Chiono.

Cegid enhanced Orli’s flexibility and retail market value by deploying Oracle WebLogic Server through Oracle’s virtual cloud networks, which provide customizable cloud networks within OCI in the Oracle data center, giving Cegid’s clients increased performance of their Orli system.

“With Orli running on OCI, we can gradually scale it as new customers come in and existing customers switch to our SaaS solution,” says David Chargros, cloud architect for Cegid. “Because Orli was built with Oracle tools, what better platform for our offering than Oracle’s own.”

The OCI subscription fee included the Oracle WebLogic Server license, lowering Cegid’s total cost of ownership for cloud compute resources. The company is now extending Orli SaaS to retailers in French-speaking countries of North Africa, an important target of Cegid retail due to the large number of subcontractors supplying the French garment manufacturers.

Administrative improvements stemming from OCI include more agile patching, stronger security, and the automation of previously manual backup and monitoring. Cegid is currently migrating Orli to the Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing database to gain even greater capacity to service its growing roster of SaaS clients.

A big reason why Cegid selected Oracle was the support provided by Oracle Consulting during the company’s transition to the cloud.