Download PDF
China’s Retail Giant Unveils Massively Scalable, OpenStack-Based E-commerce and IaaS Platform
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Sales & Marketing
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Retail Store Automation
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Bailian Group, China's largest retailer, faced the challenge of transforming its business model from traditional brick and mortar to omni-channel business to keep up with the rapid growth of online commerce in China. The company's existing IT infrastructure was complex and not conducive to the fast-paced innovation required in the e-commerce sector. Low server utilization, long provisioning times, and high operating costs were impeding the company's growth in the omnichannel sales sector. The company needed a large-scale IT platform that would enable innovation and growth, with fast development, dynamic scaling, uncompromised availability, and low cost of operations.
About The Customer
Shanghai-based Bailian Group is China’s largest retailer with more than 6000 department stores, supermarkets, and outlets across 25 cities and provinces. With over one billion annual store visits, the state-owned enterprise has grown to become the nation’s 84th largest company. However, like other fast growth geographies, China’s retail business continues to transform from brick and mortar to online commerce. Mobile phone users in China reached 1.3 billion in 2015, and mobile internet access soared to over 400 million users. This massive mobile and online growth, combined with China’s entrepreneurial culture, brought major changes to the retail industry. New competitors now offer mobile, social and celebrity-based sales models, while established companies launched multi-channel retail that merges e-commerce with in-store services.
The Solution
Bailian Group chose to implement an OpenStack-based cloud platform to drive its business transformation. The company selected Mirantis as the vendor to guide their OpenStack platform design and development, impressed by the OpenStack Foundation’s continuous innovation and rich feature releases, as well as Mirantis’ strong IaaS, PaaS, and CI/CD experience. Bailian Group also selected the OpenStack managed services of UMCloud, a joint venture between Mirantis and UCloud. The company built a 20-node MVP using the latest OpenStack distribution and Fuel software to deploy and manage all cloud components. The architecture included Ceph distributed storage, neutron and OVS software defined networking, KVM virtualization, F5 load balancers, and the StackLight logging, monitoring and alerting toolchain.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Improving Production Line Efficiency with Ethernet Micro RTU Controller
Moxa was asked to provide a connectivity solution for one of the world's leading cosmetics companies. This multinational corporation, with retail presence in 130 countries, 23 global braches, and over 66,000 employees, sought to improve the efficiency of their production process by migrating from manual monitoring to an automatic productivity monitoring system. The production line was being monitored by ABB Real-TPI, a factory information system that offers data collection and analysis to improve plant efficiency. Due to software limitations, the customer needed an OPC server and a corresponding I/O solution to collect data from additional sensor devices for the Real-TPI system. The goal is to enable the factory information system to more thoroughly collect data from every corner of the production line. This will improve its ability to measure Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and translate into increased production efficiencies. System Requirements • Instant status updates while still consuming minimal bandwidth to relieve strain on limited factory networks • Interoperable with ABB Real-TPI • Small form factor appropriate for deployment where space is scarce • Remote software management and configuration to simplify operations
Case Study
How Sirqul’s IoT Platform is Crafting Carrefour’s New In-Store Experiences
Carrefour Taiwan’s goal is to be completely digital by end of 2018. Out-dated manual methods for analysis and assumptions limited Carrefour’s ability to change the customer experience and were void of real-time decision-making capabilities. Rather than relying solely on sales data, assumptions, and disparate systems, Carrefour Taiwan’s CEO led an initiative to find a connected IoT solution that could give the team the ability to make real-time changes and more informed decisions. Prior to implementing, Carrefour struggled to address their conversion rates and did not have the proper insights into the customer decision-making process nor how to make an immediate impact without losing customer confidence.
Case Study
Digital Retail Security Solutions
Sennco wanted to help its retail customers increase sales and profits by developing an innovative alarm system as opposed to conventional connected alarms that are permanently tethered to display products. These traditional security systems were cumbersome and intrusive to the customer shopping experience. Additionally, they provided no useful data or analytics.
Case Study
Ensures Cold Milk in Your Supermarket
As of 2014, AK-Centralen has over 1,500 Danish supermarkets equipped, and utilizes 16 operators, and is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. AK-Centralen needed the ability to monitor the cooling alarms from around the country, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Each and every time the door to a milk cooler or a freezer does not close properly, an alarm goes off on a computer screen in a control building in southwestern Odense. This type of alarm will go off approximately 140,000 times per year, equating to roughly 400 alarms in a 24-hour period. Should an alarm go off, then there is only a limited amount of time to act before dairy products or frozen pizza must be disposed of, and this type of waste can quickly start to cost a supermarket a great deal of money.
Case Study
Supermarket Energy Savings
The client had previously deployed a one-meter-per-store monitoring program. Given the manner in which energy consumption changes with external temperature, hour of the day, day of week and month of year, a single meter solution lacked the ability to detect the difference between a true problem and a changing store environment. Most importantly, a single meter solution could never identify root cause of energy consumption changes. This approach never reduced the number of truck-rolls or man-hours required to find and resolve issues.