Oracle runs its warehouse management on Oracle Autonomous Database
Oracle migrates acquired warehouse management system from AWS to Oracle Autonomous Database for lower costs and better performance, elasticity, and security.
“Supply chains are transforming with cloud technologies and integrating various systems and data to remove silos for greater efficiencies and superior customer service. Warehouses are 24/7 mission-critical operations and destined to become fully automated. And fully automated, autonomous database systems that offer zero downtime are available now. Oracle, of course, is the undisputed leader in autonomous database technology.”
Business challenges
Oracle Warehouse Management Cloud is a leading cloud-based inventory and warehouse management service that automates various steps of the supply chain process to fulfill customer orders accurately and on time. Oracle acquired LogFire in 2016 as the foundation for Oracle Warehouse Management.
To continue innovating and modernizing logistics, Oracle Warehouse Management had to add new, personalized features that customers demanded. The company was spending an increasing amount of time manually managing databases to ensure 24/7 availability for customers.
Most importantly, warehouse management involves synchronizing manufacturing supply with retail demand that fluctuates with seasons, holidays—and a pandemic. Although Oracle Warehouse Management could adjust its application dynamically on Amazon Web Services (AWS) PostgresSQL, scaling and updating the databases required downtime, making the databases unavailable and slowing down its overall process. Before every seasonal peak, the company had to plan in advance to purchase additional servers on Rackspace and then manually scale down at the end of the season.
Why Oracle chose Autonomous Database
Oracle migrated Warehouse Management to Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) from AWS for better performance, higher elasticity, zero downtime, improved security, and reduced costs.
Results
Only a year after of moving its applications and 700 databases on AWS Postgres SQL to Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing on OCI, Oracle Warehouse Management order processing speeds increased by 55%. In addition, packages shipped increased by 45% and warehouse users expanded by 50%. The entire migration took a little more than seven months without any disruptions for retail customers during their seasonal peaks.
In addition, Oracle Warehouse Management reduced its operational costs by eliminating all 10 external database administration contractors and freeing resources to spend more time on development. Oracle quickly built more features and customizations to expand into 10 new industries and double the customer base, touching nearly 5 billion packages a year.
By automating monitoring and patching to protect against threats,Oracle Warehouse Management was able to strengthen its security profile. It also uses machines in Oracle Autonomous Database to encrypt data both in rest and in motion. By comparison, AWS PostgresSQL encrypts only during transmission. In-database machine learning also uses algorithms (without any data scientists involved) to predict peak hours in distribution centers, assign fulfillment priority, calculate expected profit per order, and more for hundreds of customers globally.