Maxiconsumo advances customer service with Oracle Cloud

Created in 1993 from the merger of two supermarket chains, Maxiconsumo is one of Argentina’s largest retail chains, with 35 locations throughout the national territory, including the capital Buenos Aires. With more than 1,500 employees, the company offers its consumers a wide variety of products, from food and beverages to cleaning and personal hygiene items.

In its ongoing mission to keep up with new technologies and market trends, the company created a business intelligence (BI) department about eight years ago. The initiative aims to improve internal processes and, consequently, provide higher-quality service to its customers, allies, and collaborators.

One of the biggest challenges Maxiconsumo’s BI team faced was related to large-scale data analysis for different departments within the organization, such as management, trade, logistics, and human resources. The process was carried out via an open source PostGres database on-premises system, which had slow performance and complex tools.

“It was common to hear that when sales team members needed to get the purchase itemization for a given month from a supplier, they’d run the query order through the system and go out for a coffee, hoping that when they came back this simple report would be ready on their computer screen,” says Sergio Silva, head of systems at Maxiconsumo.

Maxiconsumo decided to migrate its BI platform from an on-premises environment to the cloud. The selection team chose Oracle Analytics Cloud and Oracle Autonomous Database, which offers faster time to market, greater performance and scalability with less administration, combined with a set of advanced resources for data preparation, analysis, and visualization, as its cloud solution.

Supported by Argentina’s Oracle Consulting team, the migration to Oracle Analytics and Autonomous Data Warehouse on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure took less than four months and brought a variety of benefits to Maxiconsumo’s operations. Setting up the autonomous cloud database was easy and quick to do—just 5 minutes—for faster time to value. Data aggregation and preparation of various data types and from multiple sources is now automated for higher-quality data integrity and for more granular sales, inventory, and cost insights. The more accurate data was also analyzed much faster—in only 1- to 2-second response times—for more confident decision-making and no more complaints to the IT staff about slow reporting queries. 

The self-managing autonomous database, which automates encryption, maintenance, tuning, back up, and patching for zero downtime and more data protection, eliminated 10 manual tasks and more than a day per week of administration. The company now uses the time to focus on more strategic business insights.  

The dashboards and reports from Oracle Analytics Cloud are also much easier and friendlier to use.  Business users in sales and staffing can perform their own multidimensional analysis on key performance indicators to visually identify trends and patterns over various time periods and locations, as well as drill deeper in the data.

Now that data and reporting are more transparent and available 24 hours a day, more users are securely accessing it more conveniently, whether working in a store, in the office, or remotely at home. The increased user adoption helped management to make better decisions to improve store performance, employee engagement, and customer service.

Argentina’s Oracle Consulting helped Maxiconsumo migrate to Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse.