Ortobom boosts agility, serves customers faster with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Ortobom is an award-winning Brazilian producer of mattresses and other high-quality sleep products. The company used Oracle Database Standard Edition One to support its business operations for many years. As Ortobom expanded, so did the volume and complexity of data processing. This increased the risk of data loss or compromise. To keep data secure while meeting its growing business needs, Ortobom decided to upgrade to a more powerful database.

The company also wanted a more efficient database that required less manual oversight. Ortobom’s IT manager was spending between 40 and 80 hours each month managing the database—in particular, ensuring that backups had run as planned.

As with many retailers, Ortobom’s biggest sales period is Black Friday. When customer orders flood in, the company needs to process them as quickly as possible. However, scaling up system capacity to meet periods of increased demand took several months of preparation.

Initially, Ortobom planned to migrate only Oracle Database to the cloud and keep its third-party enterprise resource planning (ERP) system on-premises, but this would have created a delay in syncing data between factories, headquarters, and franchises. To achieve optimum latency, Ortobom considered moving its entire ERP system to the cloud.

Strong cybersecurity has always been important to Ortobom. The company originally worked with Oracle Database Standard Edition One because of the high security it offered.

To modernize this system, Ortobom selected Oracle Exadata Database Service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), based on the cost advantage compared to buying another on-premises server. “It was less than half the price of the investment we would have had to make to acquire the physical server and put it in our environment,” says Ortobom IT Manager Cesar Dupim.

Coming from an entirely on-premises environment, Ortobom was keen to work with an experienced technology provider to support the company’s transition to a cloud-based database. “Our cloud culture was zero. We wanted the reassurance of the support and knowledge transfer of a company that has that knowledge. Without the outstanding support we received from Oracle, we would not have made it,” Dupim says.

By migrating to Oracle Exadata Database Service on OCI, Ortobom delivered the superior performance, security, and scalability to support the high-volume online transaction processing the company requires for managing customer orders. OCI has significantly improved the reliability and availability of Ortobom’s database and ERP system, with zero database downtime since moving to OCI. The ERP system's availability is now close to 100%. The high-performance Oracle Exadata Database Service has eliminated the data processing glitches that used to occur in Ortobom’s legacy on-premises environment.

Ortobom estimates that the total cost of ownership for maintaining the on-premises environment would have been 70% higher than the costs of the Oracle Cloud solution.  Also, with the Oracle Universal Credits the company contracted for, Ortobom was able to have Oracle deploy a disaster recovery site at no extra charge. Oracle Exadata Database Service is backed up automatically, giving Ortobom’s IT team peace of mind that data is safe at all times and can be easily recovered if any problems occur, with just one hour’s lag time.

Ortobom’s IT manager now spends a third of the time he previously spent administering the database and ERP system. This dramatic productivity improvement has freed up time to focus on value-added business priorities such as improving data analytics and ecommerce functions and taking over general management duties outside of the IT area.

Additionally, the mattress manufacturer has benefited from extra security and agility. Generating ERP reports is now faster and more efficient, enabling better decision-making.  The company’s factories now receive and dispatch orders more quickly than before. Faster data integration across all business sites and greater system stability have shortened response times, enabling the company to manage customer orders more efficiently.

Preparing for peak sales periods, such as Black Friday, requires far less effort from the IT team yet yields better results. Before, the team spent considerable time tweaking routines and processes to boost system performance to cope with high sales volumes. With OCI’s high availability and on-demand scalability, customer orders are handled smoothly without the need to change processes or improve routines.

The accessibility of the ERP system on OCI has empowered Ortobom to introduce a home office culture, which became even more important during the COVID-19 pandemic to maintain employee engagement.