“The technologies implemented impacted multiple aspects of the business. They offer clarity, transparency, availability of resources in one time and one space. They are auditable. Furthermore, they are easily subject to inspection by shareholder advisers. On the other hand, several key aspects of information management were modernized, including growth in the field of computer security, which Mimo & Co needed to strengthen and secure its business strategy ”
Martín Romero
CIO – Mimo & Co

Context

Mimo & Co is a family business that emerged in 1965 in the City of Paraná. Its founder, Noemí, began making small productions at her home, and over time, the demand-led her to incorporate more personnel and new machinery, until landing in Buenos Aires in 1979.
Today, it is one of the most distinguished brands for kids in Argentina and manufactures garments that are sold in more than 100 exclusive points of sale and more than 300 in wholesale channels. It has a factory that has 22,500 m2 spread over two floors with design workshops, cutting, warehouses, and administrative offices, among others, and approximately one thousand employees.

Challenge

The relevance that the brand achieved in Argentina in recent years led it to expand its number of stores and increase the number of internal collaborators with different profiles, to promote and accompany new business challenges. This growth added to the transformation the retail industry is undergoing prompted the Board of Directors to take measures related to its technological infrastructure and business processes to support the new needs of the company. In this context, from the IT area, it was necessary to have a 360 vision, both of what happened in the plants and in the branches, improve collaboration and address certain security issues such as the protection of critical information, or the prevention of fraud when making payments at the points of sale.

Trends

Today what CB Insights calls “Retail Apocalypse” is going through, where there is a boom in e-commerce that prints new dynamics and the competition is focused on price reductions, improvements in products and operations, and customer experience.
At all these points, technology has great potential to add value to the business and that is why retail companies are driven to innovate and incorporate new tools.

Solution

Faced with the transformation process that Mimo & Co was going through, BGH Tech Partner worked together with the company’s technology team to accompany them on the road to digitization. Progressively, flexible tools based mainly on the cloud were incorporated, which responded to business needs, in a process of constant evolution.

Implementation

The starting point: G Suite

Mimo & Co shares many materials on a daily basis, from high-quality photos of productions to spreadsheets with stock and sales information. In order to manage and share information more easily and securely between people from different areas or headquarters of the company, who work with multiple devices, it was decided to implement G-Suite as a collaboration platform.
From BGH Tech Partner, we worked with Mimo & Co in order to carry out the migration, in different instances:
At the company’s request, it started with 70 accounts. Then, driven by the need for areas that began to see or need results, a second batch of accounts was requested. In both phases, the new accounts coexist with the previous systems.

• To make the adoption process more agile and effective, 1-on-1 trainings were held with managers and bosses where the characteristics and benefits of the platform were shown.
• To drive the use of these tools, an adoption report is shared regularly, with usage metrics and recommendations for improvements and usage statistics.

Security for critical infrastructure

Information security is a fundamental aspect for Mimo & Co, on a wide variety of topics, such as the protection of launch advances, the images of productions, or the prevention of fraud in transactions carried out in the locals.
To reduce the security breaches, a study was made of the critical infrastructure of the client, and a solution was found that could be adapted to its characteristics. In this sense, it should be simple to operate, provide wide and fast visibility, and allow access to branch data from a central site to be able to make decisions from there.
It was decided to adopt Cisco Meraki MX, a perimeter security solution (SD Wan) that
centrally managed from the cloud. Thanks to this technology we were able to:

• Reduce the implementation times of the points of sale, the visibility within and outside the corporate network is expanded, an intrusion detection and prevention system, anti malware and web content filtering is integrated.
• On the other hand, the deployment of this solution together with the centralized management of the
  Security enables the network security policy to be homogeneously and agilely aligned with the company’s security policy.
• Also, the project included the deployment and implementation of the solution in 40 sites,
  including the operation in the different plants and premises, and a managed security service for 36 months

Growth continues: SAP in the cloud

Amid growth, the Mimo & Co board saw the need to implement a leading-edge enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. They decided on SAP, but had to find out if the optimal way to manage that infrastructure was to do it on premise or in the cloud. From BGH Tech Partner, SAP was sizing to determine what would be the necessary infrastructure configuration to use in Amazon Web Services (hereinafter, AWS). The main requirements were that it had a good response in performance, that it was approved by SAP, and that costs could be optimized.
On the other hand, it was shown from a technical and economic feasibility calculation that opting for the cloud would be more economical, since it could be managed on demand and make payment according to use. In turn, this would prevent the purchase of equipment in excess, with the corresponding cost and the delay that this entails. Under this premise and after an analysis that was presented to the Board, it was decided to move forward with the AWS cloud.
This project ranged from the design of the architecture and networks and the deployment of the environments for the implementation of SAP S4 / Hana, to the support and service from the Operations and Monitoring Center (COM). Additionally, automation was incorporated so that the system starts and stops during an 8-hour workday, which reduces the price of the infrastructure since it is paid only for the time that the equipment is on. Likewise, reports are shared periodically to analyze consumption and provide recommendations on how it can be optimized, improved performance and lower costs.

Benefits

Although there are still many questions, as time passes from Mimo & Co the importance of having On Demand resources and safeguarded in the safest data processing centers, according to the needs of the business units, is clearly visualized.

Next steps

Since technology has no limits, neither does evolution. Today, work continues with Mimo & Co to analyze the processes or applications that could be brought to the cloud, and incorporate IoT technologies to improve logistics processes. Ultimately, the objective is to stay ahead with those technologies that can promote better service for employees and customers, and thus accompany IT from brand growth and transformation.