Makro boosts retail business agility and reduces costs with Oracle Cloud

The food retailer implements OCI to cut project lead time and support growth across South America while achieving 30% cost savings.

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With Oracle Cloud, we are investing in state-of-the-art systems that are bringing Makro a lot of operational efficiency and cost reductions, which translate into what we need most: increased retail competitiveness and higher profit margins.

Rafael SanchesICT Operations Manager, Makro Atacadista

Business challenges

Makro Atacadista, part of Dutch Group SHV (Steenkolen Handels Vereeniging), is a cash-and-carry wholesale and retail company operating more than 170 stores throughout Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, and Venezuela. It offers a wide range of products in both the food and non-food sectors, allowing businesses and individual customers to purchase items in any quantity. Makro functions as a shared service center for all the company’s back-office operations across all countries, with its IT department responsible for all back-office IT systems.

Makro’s IT team was struggling to meet business unit requests for new projects because of the limited capacity of its on-premises hardware, which made it extremely difficult to provision a machine with more than 16 processors. Regional business expansion was also hindered because of the month-long lead time needed to provide additional hardware resources.

Makro needed to adopt a more flexible infrastructure and reduce costs to boost its competitiveness in the retail sector.

Our old infrastructure vendor lagged in development, needing to change their whole data center just to offer a new market service. Not Oracle. Oracle announces a new product at an event, and two or three days later it is already available for me to provision within my OCI console. This is fantastic.

Rafael SanchesICT Operations Manager, Makro Atacadista

Why Makro Atacadista chose Oracle

After a detailed evaluation process, Makro selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) over competitors because of Oracle’s lower total cost of ownership combined with the benefits of running Oracle applications on Oracle infrastructure.

Results

Makro moved its infrastructure from T-Systems to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, achieving a 30% reduction in total cost of ownership. The company also moved customer-facing applications from Microsoft Azure to OCI to run its entire back office in Oracle Cloud.

Specifically, Makro moved all critical back-office applications and databases—including Oracle E-Business Suite, all financial and business intelligence applications, and its entire Oracle Retail suite—to OCI to significantly increase operational efficiency, business agility, and competitiveness.

With OCI, the company’s IT team can now provision hardware resources in just a few clicks, where previously it needed 15 days to provision planned resources, and up to 40 days for unplanned resources. This has enabled Makro to be highly responsive to business unit demands, and to execute countrywide and regional retail projects without unnecessary delays.

Makro also reduced infrastructure costs by replacing its virtualized colocation data center in Brazil with Oracle Cloud and consolidating 45 database servers with Oracle Exadata Cloud Service. The high-performance database service reduced the overnight batch processing time by 70%, ensuring that each retail store’s product, invoicing, and customer databases are fully updated at the start of each working day.

The company also eliminated reporting delays and application problems during monthly financial closings, thanks to the dedicated tenancies and lower latency provided by OCI.

With its new OCI paradigm, the company is no longer constrained by limited hardware capacity and can instantly increase resources as the business requires. In addition, OCI’s higher performance and simplified administration has reduced the effort that Makro’s hardware technicians need to spend on maintenance by at least 40%—enabling them to focus on strategic planning to meet the company’s business objectives, which include digital transformation and new store openings.

Makro has also improved its disaster recovery capability and increased data security with OCI, which was an initial concern for the company when adopting the public cloud.

Overall, OCI has provided the foundation to support Makro’s business model shift from wholesale to retail, as well as its digital transformation.

Partners

To assist with its OCI implementation project, Makro engaged Addere Tech to provide the architectural knowledge of Makro’s environments.

Published:April 8, 2022