Grupo Comercial Control, a long-established Mexican retailer, has gain greater visibility and control over its fulfilment network with Pure Storage.
With more than 50 years of retail experience, Grupo Comercial Control has seen big changes in the retail industry over customer expectations.
With increasing competition from online retailers that reach shoppers anywhere in the world, it is even more important for the company to attract customers with excellent customer experiences.
Leveraging an intelligent data platform built on Pure Storage, Grupo Comercial Control aims to gain greater visibility and control over its fulfilment network.
This insight helps the company take customer experiences to the next level by making sure that they always find the products they want in stock.
The mission of Grupo Comercial Control is to deliver strong customer satisfaction by exceeding expectations. The IT team is charged with storing, maintaining and efficiently using massive amounts of data to achieve this goal.
“To improve sales and customer experiences, we need to understand the customer and improve visibility into systems such as inventory to get customers the products and services they want,” said Mario Ibarra, SAP Databases and Storage Administrator.
“For that, we need the best technology.”
The existing storage solution was facing technological obsolescence, slow processes and limited capacity. The IT team began searching for a new storage solution that would be easier to manage and would deliver modern features needed to solve bottlenecks and support data growth.
Today, Grupo Comercial Control uses Pure Storage FlashArray//X with DirectMemory Cache, making the company the first in Mexico to take advantage of Direct Memory Modules (DMM).
FlashArray supports greater performance for all business-critical data and workloads, including SAP HANA databases, business intelligence and inventory and sales systems.
All sales integration processes take advantage of SAP HANA Native Storage Extension (NSE), saving memory and making better use of SAP HANA Enterprise.
The IT team manages data backups through snapshots replicated to AWS, supporting the company’s hybrid cloud strategy. Snapshots take just seconds – a big change from the six hours needed previously to synchronize discs overnight multiple times a week.
Spinning up new environments takes less time, improving recovery times.
Meanwhile, compression and deduplication in FlashArray reduce the space needed for multiple test, quality and development environments.
Grupo Comercial Control plans to continue growing its business in Mexico with support from Pure Storage.
The innovative storage solution is preparing the company to address the future of retail and continue to exceed customer expectations by turning data into great results.
“Pure Storage solutions have allowed us to be closer to our customers, to understand their behavior and to adapt to the changes that have taken place worldwide,” said Ibarra.
Grupo Comercial Control is a 100% Mexican-owned company with more than 50 years of retail experience. The company includes Del Sol, Woolworth, Boutiques Locura department stores, Noreste Grill and Café W restaurants.
BOX OUT
Impact on Grupo Comercial Control
- Attracts customers by identifying products that people want
- Reacts quickly to changing retail industry during COVID
- Achieves 80% performance improvement for critical applications
Challenges
- Storage lacked modern features to support new technologies
- Backups took a lot of time and effort
- Storage was difficult to manage, taking up limited IT team resources
Results
- Maximizes performance of SAP HANA native storage extension data tiering
- Enhances resiliency with snapshots processed in seconds
- Supports business growth by reducing daily storage maintenance
