Stellantis streamlines services in Brazil with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
The global automotive company migrates back-office applications to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to improve reporting speed and legislative compliance.
“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with Exadata Database Service exceeded our highest expectations with regard to performance, security, and quality. With state-of-the-art IT infrastructure, we are able to deliver the best user experience for our clients across the automotive group, and are extremely satisfied with the results we have been achieving.”
Business challenges
Stellantis Shared Services South America is responsible for providing all back-office and administrative services to Stellantis Group companies globally.
To manage critical software, including its complex foreign trade and tax management applications, the company was using on-premises IBM systems that had reached the limits of their capacity. Stellantis needed to improve application speed and also its ability to rapidly generate financial reports for the Brazilian government, because it was frequently subject to fines for submitting records after the deadline.
Because its foreign trade application had to comply with Sarbanes Oxley standards, Stellantis needed a secure system that could also ensure high availability as well as rapid recovery in the event of disaster.
The platform also needed to be highly scalable to facilitate the merger of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) with the French PSA Group, and simplify future acquisitions.
OCI with Exadata Database Service is without a doubt the most powerful platform on the market for the complex apps we run.
Why Stellantis chose Oracle
Stellantis understood that in order to meet the needs of technological evolution and business growth it needed to replace its on-premises IBM systems with a modern cloud infrastructure solution. Of particular focus was the ability to manage the high-demand workloads of its foreign trade application, which is used for intra- and intercompany global trading of all vehicle components, as well as the automobiles themselves.
Stellantis evaluated several cloud providers, including Amazon and Google, and conducted numerous proofs of concept to compare infrastructure performance. The company selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with Exadata Database Service because of Oracle’s superior ability to process huge volumes of data while also meeting the company’s information security needs. In the test environment, OCI achieved speeds 40% faster than the company’s legacy on-premises hardware, and it also offered the best price-performance ratio compared to other cloud providers.
Stellantis cut foreign trade reporting time by 50%, enabling it to submit monthly records to the government in a timely manner and avoid incurring fines.
Results
Stellantis improved software performance while also enhancing security, reducing costs, and boosting scalability by deploying Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to host administrative applications. These applications provide vital shared services for the entire automotive group.
Using OCI to replace its on-premises IBM Power 8 systems, the company achieved a nearly 50% reduction in the time required to process reports and perform calculations through its Comex foreign trade application. This was critical, given the group’s highly intricate internal and external supply chain for 14 vehicle brands, its presence in more than 100 countries, and the complexity of Brazilian foreign trade legislation.
With a more powerful infrastructure, the company now delivers shared services for the group much faster. For example, the payroll run takes just a few minutes, compared to 12 hours previously.
OCI also improved disaster recovery for the company, and provided high availability for the Comex application, ensuring that the company complied with strict Sarbanes Oxley standards.
In addition, Stellantis boosted protection for its data and applications by activating several layers of OCI security, implementing next-generation firewalls on both the Oracle and client side, and creating a dedicated end-to-end MPLS connection with Oracle Cloud.
The deployment has freed up valuable time for the company’s infrastructure team because it no longer needs to perform regular maintenance or worry about resource availability, thanks to OCI’s elasticity and monitoring tools. The platform’s automatic scalability greatly simplified the merger of PSA Group and FCA, and made it easy for Stellantis to incorporate new companies into the group.
Using OCI to run its foreign trade application, Stellantis reduced the number of processing cores it required from 10 to 8, freeing up two processors to add another workload, its high-demand tax system.
About the customer
Stellantis is a global automotive manufacturing corporation. It was formed in 2021 by the merger of Fiat Chrysler Automotive and the PSA (Peugeot) Group. With 14 renowned brands, it is the world’s fifth-largest automaker in terms of vehicle sales.