Sedar Global leverages Oracle APEX to enhance end users’ reporting capabilities
The leading provider of home furnishings moves its bespoke enterprise application development and production workloads from AWS to OCI.
“Moving our Oracle APEX environment to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has allowed us to be more productive and gain from increased security and pricing flexibility than when we used AWS.”
Business challenges
Sedar Global is one of the world’s leading companies in the manufacture, design, and installation of window and wall furnishings. The family-owned business is now led by fourth- and fifth-generation family members and has over 23 showrooms across 8 countries. With such a long and rich heritage, the company has evolved over decades to being a one-of-a-kind business. Due to the custom nature of Sedar’s products and the related complex business process requirements, company leaders were never able to identify a packaged ERP solution that fit the company’s unique needs.
Consequently, Sedar’s technical staff used Oracle APEX to develop a bespoke suite of applications, known internally as Spine because it serves as the “backbone to business operations.” Spine is employed to manage finance, procurement, inventory, sales, and logistics operations. The team also crafted an internal mobile messaging application to increase efficiency, especially for salespeople working on showroom floors.
In 2016, Sedar moved development and production activities to Java Cloud Service on the first generation of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). However, at that time, Java Cloud Service did not fulfil the company’s requirements because it was too complicated and had many limitations relating to application development and deployment capabilities. Subsequently, Sedar shifted its workloads to AWS and Amazon RDS.
But in 2019, when technical staffers attempted to develop more robust reporting and analytics, including interactive dashboards, they hit a roadblock. AWS did not support the latest version of Oracle APEX, which was required to develop the desired reporting enhancements. Also, Sedar’s technical team wanted more control of and access to database and virtual machine instances. As a result, Sedar evaluated options for getting its development activities on the latest version of Oracle APEX.
With OCI, our staff have proactive control over computing resources in each environment, which is greater flexibility than what they experienced with AWS.
Why Sedar Global chose Oracle
After evaluating the current generation of OCI, Sedar decided to move its development and production workloads to Oracle’s cloud infrastructure to ensure that development staff could take advantage of the current features and capabilities in Oracle APEX. The ease of deploying APEX on OCI was a major factor in the decision. The company also chose Oracle Enterprise Database Service to replace Amazon RDS, gaining enhanced database management capabilities such as encryption and redaction, real application testing, and diagnostics.
In addition, Oracle Data Guard would eliminate the complexity of configuring database disaster recovery along with providing the capability of managing data replication and failover/fail-back between the primary and the secondary databases.
OCI’s native security features helped Sedar to significantly increase its ability to protect data and applications from malicious internet traffic and cyberthreats.
Results
After migrating workloads to OCI, Sedar’s leadership and technical staff have been impressed with its user-friendly interface and advanced cloud computing features. Eight instances of the company’s Spine ERP are hosted on OCI in Oracle’s London data center, supporting about 500 end users across 10 countries. Staff can proactively choose how much RAM and the number of CPUs that are needed in each OCI environment to optimize performance and costs, providing more flexibility compared to AWS. OCI’s native security services, such as Oracle Web Application Firewall, and built-in networking features, such as Oracle Load Balancer, lets Sedar publish its public applications securely to the internet with minimal risks and configuration efforts.
Using Oracle APEX, Sedar expanded the reporting capabilities it offers stakeholders, now supporting over 450 reports in a variety of formats. Dashboards are available for every Spine module, which are especially popular with salespeople in Sedar’s showrooms who use the company’s bespoke mobile apps to boost productivity. All interactions pass through Oracle Enterprise Database Service and OCI.
Because the bulk of the organization’s operations are in the Gulf Cooperation Council region, Sedar is in the process of moving its workloads to the Oracle Dubai Cloud data center to maximize performance for its employees and customers. Disaster Recovery environments soon will be hosted in the Oracle Abu Dhabi cloud data center.
About the customer
Established in 1892, Sedar Global has always sought perfection in designing, manufacturing, and installing window and wall décor. The company’s products now adorn the interiors of more than 2 million homes, businesses, and government facilities.