With BUI's help, Pick n Pay and Endoxa make the move to Azure

The challenge

For over a decade, retail supply-chain workflow specialists Endoxa have enabled Pick n Pay to digitise many of its processes, master data alignment, new product listings, and automated supply-chain reporting. By making commercial transactions electronic, Endoxa's software has "saved us lots of time and money," says Gary Lea, Group Executive Retail Finance at Pick n Pay.

So integral is the workflow solution that the parties' SLA requires Endoxa to be up 99.75% of the time. "Our system relies on very high resilience of data and uptime," explains Endoxa director and Head of Software Development, Vlad Surducan. "Azure brings huge peace of mind." Lea agrees: "Switching to Azure was critical for us. As a retailer, if you're not moving to the cloud, you're going to be left behind."

The solution

BUI migrated the business-critical system to Azure in July 2021, and the move went off without a hitch. Everyone involved can now sleep easier knowing that even in the event of a catastrophic failure, the entire system will be up and running again in 15 minutes.

"This was not just a regular lift and shift. It was absolutely critical that we were able to ensure zero downtime."

- Ryan Roseveare, Managing Director at BUI

Efficiency, simplification, quality data

Today Endoxa governs and supports all of Pick n Pay's relationships with 7,000 vendors across Africa. Creating an article used to take three weeks; it now takes 48 hours. Suppliers no longer phone to ask when a product will be listed, they log into the Pick n Pay Supplier Portal to track progress themselves, a level of transparency that has reduced 'discrepancy documents' by up to 70%.

"It's very rare to find a partner where there's always a solution," says Lea. "Nothing is ever a problem with Endoxa. And the really strong IT foundation they've built means we can very quickly tie into other systems and launch new projects." Even more so now that they're on Azure.