Disaster Recovery, storage, analytics and Big Data solutions from AWS help reduce costs and make the work of the leading Mexican pharmaceutical distributor even more efficient.
For more than 85 years, Marzam has been the most experienced company in providing healthcare products and solutions, connecting the Mexican population with good health.
With an infrastructure of 10 branches throughout Mexico and a distribution center (CEDIS), Marzam has become a leading supplier of healthcare products, delivering more than 350,000 products daily to more than 26,000 points of sale, including independent pharmacies, regional chains, supermarkets, private hospitals and government.
About two years ago, Marzam started a modernization process that involved investments in Digital Transformation to optimize operational processes and thus ensure the continuous operation of its applications in CEDIS.
Together with Nubosperta, Marzam implemented a cost and productivity-efficient contingency plan based on a hybrid model of Amazon Web Services cloud and on-premises equipment.
Jose Luis Hidalgo Garza, CIO, Marzam, said: “By migrating to the AWS cloud, we could save 85%, spend 15% or less than we would have spent and invested if we had decided to maintain high availability equipment on-premises.”
The challenge
As one of the leading distributors of pharmaceuticals and personal care products in Mexico, Marzam has more than 37,000 orders per day. Almost all branches operate during the night and early morning hours to ensure that customers are served with the highest quality standards.
Garza explains that the equipment operating in each branch and the picking system are on-premises.
“Since nighttime is a difficult time to operate, we needed help to ensure that everything was working properly and that – in cases of contingencies – we could send additional teams with a good response time,” said the CIO.
Given this scenario and as part of its Digital Transformation strategy, the company needed to design a secure and reliable architecture to ensure the recovery of its operations in CEDIS when failures of the physical servers on which the applications run happen.
“The maximum recovery time (RTO) should be less than 30 minutes,” said the CIO.
Why Amazon Web Services?
Supported by Nubosperta customer service platform (CRM) and the Amazon Web Services CloudEndure Disaster Recovery contingency recovery solution, a solution was developed to give a picture of the operation of physical servers in customer distribution centers.
Hugo Garcia, CEO, Nubosperta, said: “We did several tests to validate that the times it took for the solution to meet the company needs improved. The challenge was that the recovery time should not exceed 30 minutes. We developed this solution in four months.”
In addition to the CloudEndure Disaster Recovery tool, the contingency platform uses AWS core services for storage, security and processing, ensuring that operations are not interrupted during a contingency.
With this hybrid infrastructure, Marzam can handle more than 350,000 products delivered every day across 10 branches, a distribution center and nearly 600 delivery routes.
“We can manage more than 10,000 items from 250 different suppliers without any system downtime,” said Garza.
Migration to SAP
As part of its innovative project, Marzam is currently working to replace its IBS ERP with the SAP system. Garza says that the current ERP needs many integration layers and those layers are basically Windows.
“The Windows loads run on Amazon cloud infrastructure. With the new ERP some layers will be eliminated. The goal is for the integration layer to go to the AWS cloud or ERP,” explained Garza.
Benefits
By implementing a cloud infrastructure, Marzam could reduce by 85% the CAPEX that a traditional contingency solution would require.
Using Amazon CloudEndure Disaster Recovery, Marzam does not need to keep the instances activated but only the continuous replication processes that ensure recovery of the operation within the recovery point established by the business, increasing cost efficiency.
The CloudEndure Disaster Recovery solution also enables multiple recovery points over the last hour before the failure incident, ensuring continuous operation.
Thanks to the Nubosperta CRM platform automation solution, Marzam can activate the deployment of its instances through the customer service portal without further assistance, ensuring maximum turnaround time.
Despite being able to respond quickly to incidents, the company has not faced any significant occurrences in the last two years since implementing CloudEndure Disaster Recovery.
“This directly impacts the company business, which operates in a very competitive industry. It also helps us fulfill our mission to deliver effective and timely provisions at the highest quality standards, driving growth for our customers and suppliers,” said Garza.
