PAC2000A is the largest cooperative of the Conad Consortium and the largest organization of associated independent retailers in Italy. It was founded in 1972 and to date its sales network extends over much of central and southern Italy, where it represents the leading large-scale retailer. It has about 1525 outlets.
Two of PAC2000A’s hallmark goals are to protect and grow the profitability of member companies and to improve the quality of service and offerings in order to better meet customers’ needs.
The scenario
The rapid increase in membership has led to a growth in outlets throughout Italy. During the past few years PAC2000A has grown exponentially in terms of member outlets, and this could have led to an increase in criticality and thus also to an increasing need to hold an application of a radical solution.
PAC200A gained an early awareness of wanting to rationalize and optimize data management, freeing itself from infrastructural limitations.
Gway was able to meet this demand by implementing two Private Cloud Appliances (PCAs) and completely rewriting the member portal.
The business challenge
The infrastructure need for PAC2000A was first and foremost to secure only the database part, as well as to upgrade the database itself, with the goal of expanding to other areas.
Following the collaborations related to PCAs and the rewrite of the member portal with which PAC2000A was satisfied, the company decided to commission gway for another project: that of SPOC (Single Point Of Contact), i.e., another web application integrated with the portal itself that could manage all point-of-sale assets.
The solution
Thanks to gway’s consultative approach, we were able to find a solution that provided PAC2000A with the answers they were looking for.
After examining several solutions, the Private Cloud Appliance solution met the needs perfectly: solving both performance and licensing issues, as well as rewriting the database with a different perspective. In addition, thanks to the implementation of PCA, there is the possibility of pinning cores on virtual machines based on the number of licenses purchased.
The results
As a result of the implementation of the new infrastructure and the management of data and application migrations, the company has, from the outset, experienced increased and robust performance compared to the old infrastructure, and the following numbers provide clear evidence of this:
- average of 19 million records imported per day of receipt headers, receipt lines, promotional detail, all from the sales network;
- average of 16 million aggregated records in specific data marts in about 2 hours;
- served: 2,500 users, 1525 points of sale linked to about 6,000 checkout points also linked to loyalty services for more than 3 million customers.
The Member Portal has been completely rewritten. A new graphic design and a major technological upgrade, made it possible to innovate but preserving the application and information assets that link the Portal itself to the Back Office management systems of the points of sale. Particularly relevant are the modules of Notices to pdv, the Documental and the completely autonomous Point of Sale Management of users.
The new SPOC will manage all Customers and Assets by appropriately linking the chain Industry, Suppliers, Dealers. In one place, with full transparency and operational simplification, price lists, orders, up to the invoicing cycle will be managed. A single application platform, where to register contracts, invoice maintenance fees and intervention reports, and manage Service Tickets.
Another completely rewritten application is Data Analysis, a custom tool that allows, without BI support, to extract sell-out data, in various formats, from the entire sales network.
PAC2000A also relied on gway for training support with the goal of transferring know-how to the company’s IT structure.