Delly's uncovers new market opportunity with Oracle Commerce

Delly’s Food Service is the largest food distributor in Brazil, with operations in 13 of the country’s 26 states. The company serves small and medium-size restaurant operators, grocery stores, and more recently, home delivery customers.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Delly’s business was disrupted as restaurants closed and lockdown orders discouraged customers from shopping in stores.

To survive and continue to grow, the company needed to augment reliability and efficiency in food supplies. Delly’s also wanted to standardize processes that were traditionally handled manually by some 1,500 sales reps.

Recognizing the deep impact to its customers, Delly’s adopted a strategy of digitizing its offline business model. The company decided on a cloud-based commerce platform to boost business-to-business (B2B) revenue and to cultivate new business-to-consumer (B2C) revenue streams.

Delly’s Food Service consulted with Oracle partner Compasso UOL on the best approach to modernize its traditional sales strategies. Compasso recommended Oracle Commerce, part of the Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience suite of applications, as a key building block of the food distributor’s digital transformation.

By deploying Oracle Commerce, Delly’s created a central location for order and delivery tracking of its 13,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs) and presented food operators with a more intuitive digital storefront. The food distributor experienced strong adoption at the outset with a 20% increase in website registrations as restaurants, grocery stores, and individuals shifted their food purchases online.

The new platform also increased site traffic by organizing Delly’s product catalog into a hierarchy, giving Brazilian customers rich category pages and a satisfying navigation experience.

Along with the surge in digital traffic, the food distributor registered a doubling in average order size—from 1.5 to 3.5 SKUs per order—leading to a greater understanding of the customers’ shopping habits and better service for the takeout and delivery order business in the B2C segment.

Personalization features of the platform, including dynamically localized offers and menus adapted to Brazil’s regional eating preferences, have resulted in enhanced customer experience and loyalty.

In addition to facilitating choice for food operators, Delly’s has streamlined operations by consolidating workflows across its subsidiary companies within Oracle Commerce and presenting customers with one transparent portal for food distribution lifecycle management.

Delly’s reported that gaining buy-in from the sales force was also vital in the adoption of the new digital architecture. Salespeople, formerly working solo, became empowered by guided selling policies that have allowed reps to leverage sales histories and customer touchpoints to increase business.

Compasso.UOL, an Oracle Specialized Partner and one of the leading implementers of Oracle CX solutions, advised Delly’s on the digital transformation, initially creating a minimum viable product. With the digital storefront in place and accepted by test users, Delly’s went live after nine months in October 2020 and continues to enhance the platform.