VLI improves cargo management efficiency and reliability with OCI

Brazilian logistics operator VLI has enjoyed strong growth in recent years, particularly through transporting grain, a vital export for the national economy. Time to market is a crucial factor in the efficiency and profitability of cargo delivery. It requires careful planning and precise execution to ensure timely deliveries using 800 locomotives and 24,000 wagons on a railroad network of 8,000 kilometers.

VLI’s aging on-premises systems—which issue bills of lading and manage train movement—were becoming increasingly unreliable, with frequent system errors and outages. Patching and maintaining the databases supporting the custom applications could take up to 10 hours, causing system downtime, significantly delaying the loading and dispatching of trains. This impacted the entire logistics chain by delaying subsequent trains and loading at ports—reducing VLI’s productivity and profitability.

To overcome this challenge, VLI decided to modernize its infrastructure to increase operational efficiency and customer service. Also, it wanted to deploy a disaster recovery and backup site to mitigate risk.

After a thorough review of technology vendors, VLI decided to partner with Oracle to upgrade and migrate core applications to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and the database to Exadata Database Service. This was based on three criteria: performance, technology, and collaboration.

“We identified Oracle as the ideal partner. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with Exadata Database Service scales for large transactional volumes, is optimized for very fast response time, and has a high degree of resilience. Being able to use Oracle WebLogic Server on OCI was also a strong advantage,” says CTO André Braz.

VLI also liked Oracle’s model of rolling out regular product updates to its customers, with minimal customer input required. This would allow the company to focus on its core business operations and goals, knowing its technology was up to date. VLI also planned to adopt OCI’s Analytics Cloud with integrated, predictive models to expand decision-making for generating new revenue streams.

VLI and Oracle worked together to ensure a frictionless migration to OCI with almost zero downtime and minimal impact on business operations. As part of the review and testing process, VLI cut 12% of existing data that were no longer needed, leading to improved performance and cost reductions.

After the migration to OCI, system errors dropped by 30%.  Crucially, VLI improved its ability to load and dispatch trains correctly and on time, enhancing customer service, productivity, and profitability. The company also experienced a much lower volume of failures, incidents, and downtime that affected the VLI’s ability to fulfill agreements with clients to deliver cargo on time.

The company anticipates further efficiency gains and increased customer satisfaction due to the faster processing speed and high availability of its new billing system. OCI supports seamless integrations with VLI’s other business systems and applications for a streamlined working experience.

To enable disaster recovery deployment in OCI, VLI successfully redeployed some of its legacy applications to operate in multiple Oracle Cloud data center regions. The company is now poised to implement disaster recovery and backup in OCI, for business continuity and peace of mind.

Oracle Partners DXC Technology and Grupo Multi supported VLI in the transition process, particularly with refactoring parts of some applications’ coding. “DXC Technology and Grupo Multi were very useful in helping us convert applications to the latest version,” says André Braz.