Supplying World Industry

Systemax, the parent company of Global Industrial, is a leading multi-channel distributor of industrial equipment and supplies. With over 1,500 employees, Systemax generated nearly $950 million in revenue in 2019.

Shifting to Oracle Cloud

Systemax's operations rely on three business critical information systems; SAP for financials, Oracle Demantra for inventory forecasting, and a bespoke ERP and data warehousing package. By late 2017, the technology all three applications were running on was reaching end-of-life. With a cloud-first strategy already being adopted in the business and facing a hefty $2.5 million refresh cost for on-premises technology, Systemax was keen to migrate to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). To achieve those ambitions in tight timescales and with minimal business impact, they needed a partner skilled in OCI architecture and migration to help guide them.

Strategic Oracle Cloud Migration

The key priorities of the migration were stability, availability and robust performance, due to the highly business critical nature of the platforms involved. To support Systemax, Cintra stepped in to design an OCI platform utilizing Exadata Cloud Service for optimal performance. This project was a pioneer in the space with Systemax becoming one of the world's first organizations to implement this infrastructure. The project began with the migration of SAP to OCI Exadata Cloud Service to allow maximum time for testing, remediations and optimizations following this revolutionary implementation. Following the successful SAP migration, Cintra then efficiently transitioned Demantra and the bespoke ERP application, ensuring high availability and robust performance across the organisation.

Efficiency, Delivered

The migration to OCI led Systemax to avoid the $2.5 million on-premises technology refresh cost and reduce its data center footprint by 60%. This transition resulted in markedly better performance across all applications and reallocated over 3,000 hours annually of employee time to higher-value tasks, significantly enhancing Systemax's operational efficiency.

Starting Context: Systemax relied on key information systems, including SAP, Oracle Demantra, and a custom-built ERP, all on aging infrastructure.

Objectives of the Cloud Transformation:

• Migrate critical applications to Oracle

• Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to avoid on-premises refresh costs.

• Ensure high availability, robust performance, and effective disaster recovery.

• Reduce the overall data center footprint by 60%.

Cintra's Methodological Approach:

• Architecture Design and Planning:

• Created OCI architecture designs for each application, utilizing Exadata Cloud Service.

• Prioritized SAP migration to OCI

• Collaborated with Oracle for SAP's Exadata Cloud Service certification.

• Phased Migration and Optimization

• Executed the SAP migration first, followed by Demantra and the ERP application.

• Conducted thorough testing and optimization for each application in the new environment.

Benefits & Advantages:

• Cost and Space Efficiency: Avoided $2.5M in refresh costs and reduced data center footprint significantly.

• Enhanced Application Performance: Marked improvement in performance across all applications, moving to high-performance Exadata Cloud Service.

• Operational Improvements: Freed over 3,000 hours per year of employee time for higher-value work, and improved availability compared to the legacy setup.