French grocery chain halves inventory processing time

Chronodrive is a drive-through grocery service in France: customers shop online and drive to neighborhood pickup points where their purchases are loaded into their cars. With more than 60 grocery stores in France, two in Italy, and more on the way, Chronodrive needs up-to-the-minute knowledge of what’s selling in each store so that it can order the right inventory for the next day. To stay agile, competitive, and operationally lean in a highly competitive and fast-growing market, Chronodrive migrated its entire on-premises datacenter to the cloud in late 2014, with most workloads moving to Microsoft Azure. Azure is a public cloud environment that provides compute, storage, networking, and other services for creating and hosting applications in Microsoft datacenters.

In late 2014, Chronodrive deployed a supply-chain management application called Slim4 (from Slimstock) used for forecasting, demand planning, and inventory control. Chronodrive originally ran Slim4 on Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines using Microsoft Azure Standard Storage. However, the database layer of the application, which runs on Microsoft SQL Server 2012 database software, required more performance that what the standard storage offered. As a result, Chronodrive was unable to complete its daily calculation of products sold, then reorder products needed for the following day by its 6:00 P.M. deadline. Without this calculation, Chronodrive managers had to make educated guesses about what to order, and the company wound up with expensive unused inventory or with not enough of some items, which resulted in lost sales.

• [Data Management - Data Processing]
  After two months, Chronodrive had cut its Slim4 processing times in half—from 3 hours, 32 minutes to 1 hour, 49 minutes.
• [Cost Reduction - Inventory Management]
  Chronodrive expect to avoid significant excess inventory costs each year thanks to the extra performance delivered by Azure Premium Storage.
• [Efficiency Improvement - R&D]
  Azure's flexible infrastructure enables new application installation in Azure in less than one day.

• Azure Premium Storage Disks store data on solid-state drives and provide up to 5,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) and 200 megabytes per second (MB/sec) throughput, depending on disk size.

• The company achieves up to 25,000 IOPS and less than 1 millisecond of latency with Azure Premium Storage versus fewer than 6,000 IOPS and up to 20-second latencies with Standard Storage.

• Azure Premium Storage has reduced the time it takes to perform a monthly Slim4 calculation from seven hours to just two hours.