Publication:
April 2023
Category:
Industry 4.0
Customer:
GGROUP
Hoplix
The customer and the context
In its 70-year history, GGroup has confirmed that it rides change as that opportunity that could turn its business around.
Founded in 1948, GGroup has taken advantage of the countless transformations that the market has experienced to date, establishing itself as a leader in the car parts market throughout Southern Italy. The last challenge to offer the best service to your customers? The Cloud. Here’s how the auto parts giant approached the transition to the virtual cloud.
The history of GGroup began in 1948 with General Auto S.r.l., currently the oldest and most renowned company in Campania in the wholesale distribution of auto parts.
The expansion of the range and brands distributed as well as the services offered, meant that in 1989 the second company of the Group was born: General Parts S.r.l.
In 1998 General Auto founded Giadi Group S.r.l., together with ten other important spare parts distribution companies throughout the country.
In 2008 an agreement was signed for the distribution of Bosch spare parts and for the management of workshop projects under the Bosch Car Service and Autocrew brands, currently owned by the Group’s third distribution company: Global Service Car.
In 2018, a partnership was signed between GGroup, Ovam Group, the Distribution Group active in the Triveneto region through the distributors Ricauto and Top Car and Autodis Group.
In this way , GGroup becomes part of Autodis Italia Holding and therefore also of the Parts Holding Europe group.
From this moment on, Global Service Car S.r.l. and Service S.r.l. became two technical poles of the Autodis Group (the first in Central and Southern Italy, the second in Northern and Central Italy), together forming the new technical division at national level called Xmaster. In 2019 the new GGroup Catania headquarters was inaugurated. With the Misterbianco (CT) site, the distribution of spare parts throughout Sicily was started through a branch that manages over 90000 references.
Today GGroup is an established reality in the southern business scene (Campania, Calabria, Molise, Basilicata and Sicily) which increasingly aims at development and integration with important Italian and international organizations.
The structure covers about 13,000 square meters, of which 12,000 are warehouse, has a training room and a diagnosis center.
“Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurship. The act that fosters success with a new ability to create well-being.”
– Bruno Tessitore – CTO, GGGROUP
The Challenge
The challenge was to centralize the management of GGroup at the European level. The goal to be achieved with the Cloud approach was Business Continuity. GGroup, in fact, absolutely cannot afford downtime because this would lead to a loss of turnover to the advantage of the competition.
The VMEngine solution
Given the need and nature of the applications used, together with VMEngine, GGroup proceeded with a 1 to 1 porting of the servers present in the customer’s data center to AWS. (Lift and shift). The infrastructure designed and built by VMEngine is of the IAAS type. EC2 Virtual Servers follow Best Practices for SAP Workloads. The environment integrates Linux and Windows solutions. The customer’s choice also falls on AWS for the automation of SAP machine backups obtained through AWS backup and the BACKINT agent. The Cloud Watch service was used to monitor instance metrics in conjunction with its agent. The Lambda service was of support in programming the automation of the switching on and off of some instances.
To enable GGroup’s locations to securely reach the infrastructure on AWS, ad-hoc VPNs were created for each location via the Transit Gateway cloud router.
Benefits
Group experienced higher than expected hardware demands, so the scalability and elasticity of the AWS Cloud allowed them to scale up the specifications without impact, and with extreme speed.
The solution implemented and the intrinsic characteristics of AWS (99.9% SLA) guaranteed the Business Continuity of the business, avoiding any e-commerce downtime that would have led to GGroup damages of over 50,000 euros.
"VMEngine has allowed us to fully devote ourselves to expanding our Core Business, delegating IT management to the AWS Partner.
Thanks to the VMEngine team, we have been able to optimize SAP Workloads by adopting the relevant best practices on the Cloud"
Bruno Tessitore
CTO - GGroup