Mutual Materials improves performance with Oracle Cloud

Founded 120 years ago as a Seattle-based brick manufacturer, Mutual Materials is now a fifth-generation, $100 million company with 500 employees who produce masonry, pavers, and hardscape products in 13 manufacturing facilities. The company serves markets throughout the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia.

But as the boom in hardscape sales rushes ever closer toward an estimated $3.5 billion in the US alone, the company needed a faster and more reliable way to process orders, increase production, and ship its finished products to customers.

The manufacturer wanted to create a more efficient process for communicating product inventory and availability to customers, especially those working in the field. As part of this process transformation, the company envisioned a self-service environment for receiving and fulfilling customer orders.

Mutual Materials has a 20-year relationship with Oracle, and deep customizations in its Oracle E-Business Suite. The tight integrations between that product and Oracle Transportation Management made Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) the ideal cloud environment for the company.

Although Mutual Materials also considered Azure and AWS before choosing OCI, company leaders thought that the AWS architecture was not tailored to run an Oracle Database as efficiently as OCI.

Additionally, Mutual Materials evaluated several ecommerce solutions and ultimately selected Oracle Commerce to serve as a steppingstone for later expansion into the Oracle Customer Experience (CX) suite.

After migrating to Oracle Transportation Management, the resulting increase in stability and processing time, coupled with lower costs, convinced the company to move almost all of its hosted applications out of its partner-managed data center and onto Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Following the successful implementation of Oracle Transportation Management, Mutual Materials saw increased fleet utilization, reduced fleet expenses, a strengthening of relationships with customers and distribution partners, better operational efficiency and greater staff productivity.

In 2019, the company had moved all of its Oracle E-Business Suite workloads to Oracle Cloud, and also ran Oracle Commerce, Oracle Sales, Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation, Oracle Transportation Management, and Oracle Content Management on OCI. These systems immediately began running 20% faster on OCI.

With the adoption of Oracle Commerce, for the first time Mutual Materials can offer a personalized, omnichannel shopping experience with advanced buy online, pick up in-store ecommerce capabilities. The company also implemented complex pricing scenarios based on certain jobs, pre-negotiated pricing, and general pricing, all working seamlessly to create a curated self-service experience.

The result of the OCI move has been an increase in overall operational efficiency.  Mutual Materials branches have experienced a similar efficiency boost, leading to an increase in year-over-year sales by nearly 20%. The new digital revenue channel has also driven significant increases in average order size.

Since it began running its applications and databases on OCI, the company has experienced zero downtime, outages, or performance problems, despite a 30% surge in orders.

In addition, by running its core business applications and databases on separate virtual machines and separate block volume storage, which were replicated in different fault domains, Mutual Materials was able to increase resiliency and eliminate service interruptions.

To strengthen its security posture, Doyensys helped Mutual Materials implement Oracle Identity and Access Management service. Because Oracle Cloud regions offer multiple availability and fault domains, Doyensys designed a segregated environment for production workloads, application development and testing, and disaster recovery.

Mutual Materials also works with partner Apex IT to implement Oracle Commerce, helping ensure a seamless experience for its customers.