Business opportunity

A multinational retail chain is planning to add 800 stores to its existing 650+ outlets in one Latin American country. To ensure that new locations can be opened rapidly and at low cost, the company needed to modernize its IT infrastructure and optimize supply chain systems and processes. The resulting operational efficiencies, combined with making better use of data, will make inventory more consistently available to consumers across new and existing stores.

Technical challenge

The retailer relies on Infolog software, running on the IBM Power platform, to manage its logistics and supply chain. To facilitate the opening of new stores, the company needed to upgrade Infolog to the latest version, which first required updating its IBM i operating system and hardware. As both Infolog and IBM i systems were outdated by several generations, the retailer needed the right external partner to mitigate supply-chain operations risk during the upgrades.

Aiming also to carefully track business impact during and after expansion, the company needed a partner to collaborate on building new financial dashboards.

Our solution

Together, Kyndryl and the retailer migrated the Power landscape to Converge Enterprise Cloud with IBM Power for Google Cloud (IP4G), upgraded IBM i through two generations, and updated Infolog. The team also migrated barcode-printing software running on IBM AIX. This IP4G environment joins the retailer's SAP landscape on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), migrated five years previously.

Kyndryl drew on three-and-a-half decades of Power experience to minimize risk during the cloud migration and software updates.

The Kyndryl Consult Data and AI Services team provided consultants with deep knowledge and expert skills in SAP Performance and Profitability Management (PaPM) to integrate data into Tableau and build custom visualizations for business executive review and efficient monthly decision-making.