You don’t should be within the retail to know what an enormous deal Black Friday is. The promotions for gross sales the day after the U.S. Thanksgiving vacation are in all places, from billboards to on-line. The Steadiness, a private finance content material web site factors out that Black Friday is likely one of the largest and most worthwhile retail days of the 12 months.
And the phenomenon extends far past the U.S.: Bustle.com stories that just about 20 completely different nations have Black Friday gross sales of their very own. However what if a retail firm confronted the prospect of its core digital techniques being down throughout this pivotal 4 days?
Constructing on a strong basis
And that brings us to Carrefour – a French group and a number one world retailer. Carrefour has been a pioneer within the giant meals retail enterprise for 60 years. The corporate reaches greater than 100 million households a 12 months and will get over one million single visits to all of its on-line buying web sites on daily basis.
That’s spectacular, proper? However the leaders of Carrefour’s Brazil unit had been involved that their previous Enterprise Useful resource Planning (ERP) system wouldn’t have the ability to sustain with the calls for of a post-pandemic world. It was time to take their know-how to the subsequent stage – a brand new ERP within the cloud, that might have the ability to transfer extra shortly and on the identical time. Plus, save an excessive amount of cash.
For whom the clock ticks
As they confronted this actuality, the folks at Carrefour had been listening to the loud sound of a clock ticking. Black Friday was only a few months away. “If there was any delay within the supply of the venture, the present information heart must be shut down. In different phrases, the corporate would improve its prices for demand in November, when Black Friday takes place,” mentioned Paulo Henrique Farroco, the CIO of Carrefour Brasil. At that time, they’d a little bit over three months to get it executed.
The facility of partnership
Carrefour selected SAP S/4HANA as the one system that might cowl their total course of from origination, threat administration, and logistics by back-office processes like finance, accounting, and tax to operational processes. And so they picked associate Mignow for the venture as a result of it was essentially the most revolutionary possibility, the place all of the steps of their information migration may occur mechanically, by software program. Utilizing synthetic intelligence instruments, it understands the database, diagnoses the venture, automates the conversion steps, and performs automated updates.
Hitting the mark
With all of the items of the plan in place, Carrefour accomplished the migration to a brand new information heart and connectivity providers construction in simply three months. The extremely complicated venture included migrating from the previous on-premise system to a Cloud Software program-as-a-Service surroundings – updating the mixing structure utilizing new middleware, and putting in the very newest model of the brand new ERP. It was a significant step into the longer term, and simply as necessary, every little thing was prepared nicely earlier than Black Friday.
Including all of it up
Carrefour is already seeing the advantages from the venture. It’s lowering working prices by 40%. The migration opens up the chance for shops to foretell whether or not the amount of merchandise ordered will improve or lower, being prepared for no matter their prospects want. With extra strong and sooner evaluation of gross sales orders, they’re predicting a rise in profitability.
Carrefour is even lowering power consumption by 45% by transferring from on-premise information facilities to the cloud. The venture minimized service disruption for buyers and workers with seamless migration throughout on-premises apps. And Carrefour’s Paulo Farroco provides, “As we proceed to implement greatest practices and adapt our operations to the cloud, we’ll have the ability to scale back our prices even additional into the longer term.”
This venture earned Carrefour a winner’s place on the 2022 SAP Innovation Awards, honoring organizations which have used SAP merchandise, providers, options, and choices to profit each enterprise and society. You possibly can learn the small print behind Carrefour’s accomplishment of their Innovation Awards Pitch Deck.
