Argentina-based Arcor Group, a company established more than 60 years ago as a candy factory that has grown into a global, $3 billion manufacturer of affordable quality food products, is moving its major business operations to the cloud.
With sustained growth since 1951, Arcor now claims a spot as the country’s biggest industrial group specializing in consumer food products, packaging, and agribusiness. The company produces a wide variety of products, including confectioneries, chocolates, candy, ice creams, cookies, sauces, canned vegetables and fruits, desserts, canned fish, beverages, and oils, which are sold in 120 countries across five continents.
“Arcor works to adapt its business to a constantly changing market and competitive landscape,” says Gerardo Médico, Arcor executive vice president of administration, taxes, and systems. “By using the cloud, we give Arcor the flexibility and cost savings we need to keep pace with those changes.”
By moving to the cloud, he adds, “the company is able to respond to consumers’ changing demands, tastes, and needs by quickly replanning the operation processes in all of its 47 manufacturing plants in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Mexico.”
Cloud at Every Layer
Arcor actually began modernizing its computing systems as far back as 2009, under the leadership of Oscar Botto, Arcor Group CIO.
“We were interested in an off-premises solution that would fit our preference to not be the outright owners of our business software,” says Botto. “Everything that cloud computing is offering today is what we were seeking, and it gives us greater flexibility and a lower cost of software, infrastructure, and overall operations. We can easily separate out fixed costs, which in turn helps us focus on planning for market growth and future technology upgrades.”
Arcor uses infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to rapidly add storage, networking, and computing capacity as needed, and to scale back those resources when they are not needed. That flexibility allows the company to meet customer demand, which rises and falls around several major holidays. In the United States, for example, Valentine’s Day on February 14 leads to a large increase in chocolate sales, while in Argentina and Brazil, Easter does the same. IaaS also gives Arcor the storage, networking, and compute services required for its use of Oracle’s JD Edwards, Siebel, Demantra, and PeopleSoft applications, long a backbone of supply chain, planning, and customer relationship management functions at the company.
In addition, Arcor also uses Oracle WebCenter, a platform-as-a-service offering, to deliver a modern web experience to its 21,000 employees and its customers and to automate the creation and posting of content. Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service serves as a high-performance database, while embedded analytics help Arcor's managers gain insights from the data they’ve collected to run business processes more efficiently.
Among its software-as-a-service solutions, the company uses CRM cloud services from Oracle to manage customer interactions and integrate comments customers are making about their products on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Using Oracle RightNow Cloud Service, which links to those sites, Arcor representatives communicate with customers, answer questions, and respond to comments. The company also uses Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service to automate and improve the accuracy of its business results.
“The connected cloud layers and the services Oracle is able to deliver on top of them let us deliver real value to the business,” Botto says. “The result of our cloud project is much greater than simply connecting the various pieces. It gives us agility, security, and service.”
Linda Currey Post covers science and technology advances as a senior writer at Oracle.
