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Large US Retailer

Cloud Case Study

Cloud steps in for an US national retailer dealing with supply chain interruptions

A large national retail and consumer products company in the US had systems in place to forecast, monitor and control the progress through its fast-moving supply chain of popular items that made up a large portion of daily sales. These systems reside in physical data centres— and if those data centres were to suffer outages, disruption to the distribution network and store inventories would cause significant loss of revenue every hour services are unavailable.

The cost of creating redundant legacy systems to mitigate this risk was significant, but the data that helped forecast and control product movement—such as SKUs, purchase orders, invoice data and pricing—wouldn’t change. The intelligence the company needed to extract from that data during every minute of operation remained the same. But the system that translated one into the other had to be backed up by the most reliable architecture available.

What happened next

These systems reside in physical data centres— and if those data centres were to suffer outages, disruption to the distribution network and store inventories would cause significant loss of revenue every hour services are unavailable.

The Wins

1. The team's use of Agile best practices and DevOps techniques from start to finish helped deliver the solution incrementally.

2. In end-to-end testing, the system met all plan requirements with zero critical issues.

3. The system as designed has been extended from the retailer's core inventory to speciality areas such as pharmacy and member sales.

4. The reference architecture of the new inventory system is adaptable to pivot to other parts of the business and the company's Finance department is already working to adopt it.

5. In side-by-side tests, the new system’s predictive metrics were notably more accurate than the existing primary production system.

By the numbers

<12 months
The project moved from discovery to implementation in less than 12 months, finishing three weeks ahead of schedule.

10x more affordable
The total cost of ownership (TCO) for the cloud-based system was 10 times more affordable than a backup using data centre redundancy would have been.

<72 hours
The recovery time objective to emerge from the effects of a data centre outage shrank from 72 hours to a matter of minutes.

300+ user stories
300+ user stories and 230 data pipelines were involved in designing the new system and ingesting and processing the operational data.

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