Coclesana de Distribución (Grupo Plastimar) is a Panamanian company founded in 1999, with the goal of focusing on the sale of a wide range of disposable products, all ideal for keeping food and beverages fresh.
Today, Coclesana de Distribución is a leading company in the nationwide sale and distribution of products for the food and packaging industry, offering a broad portfolio that includes plastic containers and bottles, aluminum packaging, canned goods, cereals, pastas, and much more.
Coclesana de Distribución has established itself as a benchmark in the industry, growing to more than 5,000 clients locally, along with an ever-increasing regional presence.
“They say the big ones work with the big ones, and we're number one.” That's how Luis A. Vega, Operations and Technology Manager at Coclesana de Distribución, summed up the organization's decision to migrate its SAP Business One ERP to the AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud.
With its ERP on-premises, Coclesana de Distribución was having problems with its servers, ranging from issues with logs, backups, and service availability to security concerns and high maintenance costs.
Because of this environment, Coclesana de Distribución decided to move its SAP Business One with HANA ERP to the cloud, alongside a provider that would help it carry out the process in an agile, effective way.
This is how IVCISA, an AWS Advanced Partner, was selected to support the company on its path toward the scalability and flexibility it sought by deploying its ERP on Amazon Web Services.
Coclesana de Distribución established from the outset that the need to move its SAP Business One with HANA ERP to the cloud was based on several factors.
For an organization that is part of a holding company, it was imperative to keep the business running without interruptions and to achieve the greatest possible access to the information generated by its ERP, from anywhere and at any time.
According to Luis A. Vega, Operations and Technology Manager at Coclesana de Distribución, security and operational continuity were vital: “When we were on-premises, internet problems were a huge issue. Everything was centralized in Costa del Este (Panama City), where the server was, and if it went down, only the branch on that network kept working, but the others couldn't invoice or do anything.”
On security, Mr. Vega explained the need to keep the organization protected against ransomware attacks, because that goes hand in hand with maintaining business visibility and ensuring that accounting processes such as invoicing are not affected.
With this in mind, the organization concluded that IVCISA and AWS were the best alternative and met its parameters for availability, flexibility, security, scalability, and savings.
Operational continuity.
Constant, proactive security.
Savings on infrastructure and space costs.
“I lived with incredible stress because of the system outages, since I was the one responsible, and sometimes they happened on payday. Today, that doesn't happen—they're isolated issues that can be resolved from a cell phone.”
By reducing the limitations of the on-premises model for its SAP Business One with HANA ERP and opting for management in the AWS cloud, Coclesana de Distribución was able to maintain uninterrupted operation of critical processes such as invoicing—where approximately 35% of what the organization invoices comes in as same-day cash sales.
Today, the organization no longer experiences the system outages that used to slow down the business. As Mr. Vega, Operations and Technology Manager, noted, the system is essential for accounting to have better control, and since moving to the cloud the monthly failures that used to be an enormous problem no longer occur.
With high availability and fault tolerance, Coclesana de Distribución was able—with IVCISA's support—to minimize downtime and reduce the risk of data loss, allowing its various departments to keep managing their work. All of this while achieving significant savings in the cost of server maintenance, programming, and security.
Among the AWS services Coclesana de Distribución uses are:
“IVCISA's greatest contribution has been to business continuity. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give them a 9.5. Saying ten would mean perfection, and no one is perfect. But they come very close to it.”
