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Asun: 60 years in supermarket retail and wholesale
Founded by a family of Spanish immigrants, Asun Supermercados began its history when current director Antonio Ortiz Romacho was just 8 years old. Currently, the chain is a reference in the wholesale and supermarket retail sector in the Rio Grande do Sul region, with 40 stores distributed under the Asun supermarkets and Leve Mais Atacado banners.
The network's authority in the region is a reflection of a business vision focused on continuous evolution, always seeking to stay ahead of trends and adapt to market movements. For customers, this comes in the form of an excellent shopping and service experience.
Technology plays an important role in this sense and in our conversation with Antônio Martins, IT Manager and DPO at Asun Supermercados, he told us a little about his experience migrating and managing an Oracle cloud environment with Skyone . Come and understand this story in more detail!
Migration to the Oracle cloud: opportunities for scalability and information centralization
The decision to migrate to the Oracle cloud was made based on a series of factors that relate to the growth and evolution of the network in the market.
In 2019, Asun acquired Consinco's ERP, until now they worked with locally developed ERP. Despite there being integration between these systems, the integrations presented constant errors. These errors ended up impacting the processes, causing slowness, causing divergence of information between the sales channels and ultimately, hindering the company's growth.
ERP Consinco brought improvements, as the solution already included integration with several market players and partners. However, after 3 years, with the Oracle version used having discontinued support and the need to update the hardware, migrating to the Oracle cloud became an interesting option for Asun Supermercados.
IT today has a strategic role, its role goes far beyond infrastructure
The perceived value of an Oracle cloud infrastructure went far beyond solving systems scalability and information centralization problems. Antônio Martins highlighted that there is movement in the IT sector, bringing business and technology increasingly closer together.
“During the pandemic, the IT manager decided to modernize with the sector's work modality and responsibilities, “servers, license management, hardware, RMA, guarantees and controls. With all these processes you only focus on infrastructure and have no business vision.” – Antônio Martins: IT Manager and DPO
Today the market demands another professional profile. With the evolution of digital transformation, an IT manager begins to dedicate himself and look at the company from a different point of view. He then gains the responsibility of bringing a strategic vision to the market that also impacts the company's profitability. His role is to seek improvements in processes, innovations, security, communication between areas and identification of bottlenecks and opportunities.
“Another detail, with the General Data Protection Law (LGPD) in the Information Technology (IT) sector. This often puts the IT manager in the position of also being the Data Officer (DPO). This responsibility requires the manager to be actively involved in all departments of the company, mapping processes, identifying personal and sensitive data, understanding information flows and analyzing existing manual operations. Based on this diagnosis, it is necessary to look for appropriate tools, such as BPM, BPMS, iBPMS, DPA, to assist in this process. With the implementation of LGPD, all IT governance undergoes a complete review or construction, covering aspects such as processes, information flows, strategic alignment, decision making, structures and controls, risk management, knowledge management, training and compliance .” – Antônio Martins: IT Manager and DPO
The role of a digital evolution partner like Skyone in the face of market movements
With the contract closed, Asun's migration to the cloud was very fluid, mainly due to the good infrastructure already existing there. The migration started on a Monday, after work and the following day Skyone was already functioning as a headquarters for Asun Supermercados and employees were already accessing the systems via the Oracle cloud.
With the migration, all infrastructure management is in the hands of the Skyone team. The Asun Supermercados IT team stopped getting involved with hardware, scalability, licensing and backup issues, for example.
The network's IT began to move in line with market needs, bringing its focus to the strategic, by supporting other areas, managing internal knowledge on innovation and technology issues, cataloging processes, identifying bottlenecks and providing improvement tools. There is also another look at risk management and cybersecurity, a subject that cannot be left aside in any company today.
But bringing this innovation was a challenge, as at first the amount invested to maintain its cloud infrastructure did not seem attractive. Antônio told us a little about what was taken into account to balance the cost and benefit of this investment:
“It’s time to consider the countless benefits that information technology can bring when migrating to the cloud. A calculation is necessary, however, I invite managers to carry out a more comprehensive analysis, including the tax incentives available according to the company's tax regime. Adopting the cloud brings significant advantages, starting with the positive impact on cash. The expense of purchasing servers and storage every five years is eliminated, as well as the need to renew licenses and deal with end-of-life support (EOL), contract extensions, and storage area expansions with storage and switches. Furthermore, physical and logical security management, without interruptions, becomes more efficient, relieving the team of responsibilities that divert the focus from the business.
The move to the cloud is not limited to a simple rental; involves this entire range of benefits. It has become an indispensable reality for the growing retail and IT sector. Those who do not adapt to the cloud run the risk of remaining as traditional IT, unable to add value to the business and with a team overloaded with operational and repetitive tasks.
Employees are realizing that processes are evolving, allowing a more strategic approach instead of focusing on operational and repetitive tasks. The transition to the cloud is the fundamental step to align IT with business objectives and ensure a qualified team to adequately support operations.”
– Antônio Martins: IT Manager and DPO
The positive impact of the cloud on internal processes
After migrating to the Oracle cloud, Antonio mapped significant improvements in his processes. In the tax department, for example, the ICMS generation process, which previously took up to 8 hours, now takes a maximum of 2 hours. DDA procedures, which used to take up to 40 minutes, now take between 10 and 12 minutes to be performed.
“Today I am with you in Exadata. Adopting Exadata offers several benefits. Firstly, it provides scalability on demand, making it possible to adjust resources according to our needs. Additionally, it offers high availability and exceptional performance for critical workloads, not to mention enhanced security with advanced data protection and compliance features. Automation simplifies operations, while the flexibility of the cloud makes it easy to integrate with other solutions and services.
– Antônio Martins: IT Manager and DPO
Furthermore, the Oracle cloud has made it easier to keep system updates up to date, ensuring greater support against vulnerabilities that an expired license can bring to the company. This infrastructure also meets the requirements of verification and certification bodies, as in the case of ISO 27001, a certification that guarantees a standard for an information security management system.
Other benefits cited were centralized management, reduced use of machines, ease of use of the Skyone platform plugin and reduced demand for technical support. Asun's IT team is currently lean, with 12 people who can serve all stores. This is only possible because the migration brought greater alignment and improvement in processes.
The pioneering of SSO on the Skone platform and the benefits of this add-on
We recently announced the launch of the new Add-on for the Skyone platform, SSO – a new form of user authentication on the platform that guarantees secure access to employees, through the use of credentials already existing in your company.
Always looking for improvements, Asun is already negotiating the SSO license for 300 users. When we asked Antônio what led to the interest in this new feature, he explained that centralizing authentication is a good practice in terms of security.
“If I don't have this, I need to manage each username and password for each employee on each platform. If something happens to an employee or he leaves the company, I need to be very careful not to forget to remove his access to all systems, but this manual process leaves room for error and puts the company's data at risk.”
– Antônio Martins: IT Manager and DPO
SSO enables single, centralized management, which is within the customer's Identity Provider. There is also the possibility of creating password rules and patterns, ensuring greater access security. In this case, Asun Supermercados already uses the resource in other systems and now there is the possibility of bringing this centralization of access to the platform.
Asun Supermercados' history with Skyone guaranteed many changes and improvements to processes, but digital evolution does not stop. Asun's objective today is to continue investing in technology and technological evolution to meet the growing demands of omnichannel retail and improving the customer experience. For us at Skyone, it is a pleasure to share in this evolution.
