NFPC boosts application performance 4X on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

National Food Products Company (NFPC) is one of the largest food and beverage manufacturers and distributors in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Due to its business growth, NFPC needed a more resilient and scalable IT infrastructure to host not only its core Oracle JD Edwards application the business has been using for more than 20 years, but also third-party applications running on Microsoft SQL Server. It was looking to increase application performance while at the same time reducing its overall IT costs.

The company also wished to improve its reporting and business analysis capabilities in terms of both depth of insights delivered to managers and time needed to generate reports.

Having previously invested in technology for its on-premises IBM AS/400 systems, NFPC recognized that continuing down the same route would be extremely expensive and would also not meet its requirements in terms of functionality, scalability, and performance. It therefore started looking at various options for re-implementing its JD Edwards solution in a cloud environment.

NFPC selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) because it offered the best price-performance ratio, and also because of its simplicity and the ease with which the company could integrate JD Edwards and third-party applications. The organization also wanted to gain the performance and security benefits of having Oracle as a single vendor for its hardware, database, and other software.

NFPC lowered IT costs and significantly reduced IT maintenance time and effort by deploying OCI to host its business-critical JD Edwards software.

The Oracle implementation boosted application performance, including those applications used for food and beverage sales automation and warehouse management, which are now deployed on SQL Server images on OCI.

By using OCI instead of IBM hardware in an on-premises data center, and by refactoring JD Edwards to run on Oracle’s cloud native database, NFPC can now meet its commercial growth demands with a much more scalable environment and achieve its business continuity objectives with an improved disaster recovery setup.

With OCI, the company no longer needs to pay for Oracle or IBM database licenses and has achieved an estimated 25% savings by moving from a CapEx to an OpEx model.  

NFPC has gained deeper commercial insights by implementing Oracle Analytics Cloud to replace disparate office spreadsheets and visualizations based on Microsoft Power BI. With Oracle Analytics Cloud’s self-service functionality, analysts can now present managers with customized analytics according to the specific requirements of each food and beverage business unit.

NFPC significantly improved the power of its reporting functionality by implementing Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse to stage the information for Oracle Analytics Cloud, which has virtually eliminated reporting turnaround time. “Autonomous Data Warehouse’s capabilities give us efficiency and performance optimization based on the usage and nature of our data. With the turnaround time almost zero, the power is now in the hands of our users for both reports and dashboards,” says NFPC Group IT Director Wasef Shakaa.

Running its software on OCI has made NFPC’s applications as much as four times faster than before, which has considerably boosted the efficiency of business users across the organization. “Even during peak times the performance is amazing. It’s as if you are running something in front of you, not remotely in the cloud,” says Shakaa.

Because much of the hardware administration and data management is now carried out by Oracle teams, NFPC’s technicians are free to spend more time on high-value activities such as exploring new business analytics and database features. “Our team is now talking more at the business level than the technical level, and we’re seen as a true business partner to the rest of the organization,” Shakaa says.

For the future, NFPC has substantially enhanced its business agility and innovation capability, because it can now easily stand up, test, and deploy new environments in the cloud. Based on the success of its Oracle infrastructure and analytics platform implementation, the company is planning to roll out Oracle Enterprise Performance Management to address its planning and financial modeling requirements.

NFPC selected Oracle Partner Circular Edge to implement OCI and also to perform the lift-and-shift of JD Edwards and peripheral applications to its new environment.

“We've been working with Circular Edge for the past six years, and they know our environment inside out. They have very good functional and technical consultants who have been instrumental in getting this project moving in the right direction,” says Shakaa.