JDE on OCI Provides Increased Uptime & Resiliency for Global Trade Company
Tricon Energy
A market leader in the global trade and distribution industry, Tricon Energy manages the movement and marketing of industrial chemicals, polymers, fuels, and raw materials in over 100 countries. Founded in 1996, Tricon has grown to become one of the largest privately held companies in Houston, with annual revenues in excess of $10 billion dollars.
In order to work with its business partners more strategically, Tricon has launched a digital transformation project designed to improve data management, increase workflow automation, and streamline business processes.
“When you’re dealing in transaction volume and revenue in excess of $10 billion, your processes need to be refined,” says Craig Wood, Director of Infrastructure and Security at Tricon Energy.
Business Challenges
Tricon’s globe-spanning trading and marketing business is inherently complex. Traders operate in multiple time zones and share critical market, sales and purchasing data that directly impacts prices and tax valuations in different countries. Among other objectives, the company seeks to drive efficiency by reducing the amount of time their teams spend updating spreadsheets and sending them around the globe.
For years, Tricon had been relying on an earlier version of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne to run its core applications for business functions covering financials, distribution, sales, procurement, inventory, and more. Since the application suite lacked a module for business building and commodities trading, it had to customize the application over time, adding complexity to its IT environment.
The company also lacked an effective disaster recovery solution, causing it to struggle with single points of
failure throughout its IT environment and leading to occasional outages and downtime. With its aging version of JD Edwards no longer being supported, the company knew the time was right to upgrade to the latest version. Furthermore, Tricon sought to modernize the infrastructure, hosting the upgraded application on the Cloud to realize cost, resiliency, and performance benefits.
“We recognized that if we [didn’t upgrade], we could potentially put the business at risk,” Wood says.
How We Helped Our Customer
Modernizing Their Operations
Tricon moved quickly to modernize operations, choosing to adopt the newest version of JD Edwards applications
on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and using the opportunity to enhance its digital platform with robotic process automation (RPA), innovative Oracle BI capabilities, and the JD Edwards Orchestrator for automated real-time data management. “This was our launching point to further grow the business and allow more agility with better efficiency and less overhead,” Wood says.
Creating a Reliable, Agile Cloud Platform
To create a reliable and agile cloud platform, Tricon turned to Centrilogic, a trusted Oracle partner and certified Cloud Solutions Provider (CSP). Centrilogic helped Tricon optimize its Oracle Cloud environment and seamlessly implement the upgraded JDE suite with zero business disruptions or no downtime – all on a tight five-month deadline.
Building a Modern Disaster Recovery Solution
Next, Centrilogic designed and built a modern disaster recovery solution to meet Tricon’s strict operating requirements, including a broad geographic distribution and rapid recovery time.
“We now have a highly available and redundant front end, a redundant application stack, and a highly available database that is instrumental to our business continuity plan,” Wood says.
The company also engaged Centrilogic for ongoing managed services that has reduced support tickets by about 90%.
The Results
By moving to Oracle Cloud, Tricon cut operating costs significantly, allowing it to redirect the savings into higher availability systems and better disaster recovery. This put the company in a more resilient position to handle
any potential catastrophic business event. The company estimates it has realized savings of 30% or more since migrating to OCI.
“Our ability to reinvest these resources in other areas has enabled IT to become a more strategic partner,” Wood says. “What we’ve gained in functionality and resiliency was just terrific.”
Moreover, Tricon’s new digital platform enabled the company to consolidate its data assets in the cloud and realize a centralized vision in which Tricon no longer needs to maintain file servers across diverse regions and countries. Without this modern digital infrastructure, Wood says, “we may not have grown this quickly, this efficiently, or as fruitfully.”
Embracing this cloud strategy with the help of Centrilogic has enabled Tricon to meet a range of board-level demands, as well as new bank cybersecurity requirements. In addition, it has boosted productivity by helping teams eliminate manual processes and accelerate decision-making.
“From an IT perspective, we now have better uptime and better resiliency, which is meeting the board’s needs. We have a more cost-effective environment and it provides many other amenities that we couldn’t justify in the past. Centrilogic has been instrumental in laying out best practices and creating a modern landscape with the Oracle cloud environment that we’ve never been exposed to before.”
The “Tricon Insights” Initiative
Thanks to a CEO-sponsored initiative called “Tricon Insights,” the company also built a centralized dashboard that uses Oracle BI capabilities and third-party data feeds to help the company track market trends and improve business analytics.
“Instead of spending 2 to 4 hours on a spreadsheet every day, we’ve created automatic data feeds and high- availability dashboards, which reduces reliance on e-mail flow and saves time,” says Wood. “This gives us more real- time data to drive better decisions.” Craig Wood, Director of Infrastructure and Security at Tricon Energy.
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