SMU is the second largest retailer in Chile. It has seven brands in its portfolio, 10 million members, and serves the needs of 80% of Chile's population. Up to 18.3% of local food sales come from SMU. Unimarc, one of SMU's subsidiaries and the largest chain supermarket in Chile, has more than 500 stores. SMU's eight logistics distribution centers supply all goods to these stores, including Unimarc chain retail stores and Alvi warehouse stores.
In Latin America, large-scale retailers have been moving towards an online model. In 2022, SMU invested heavily in constructing their own e-commerce channel through proprietary e-commerce webpages and apps, which they have used to explore service diversity. Additionally, they actively expanded networks for offline stores to improve the offline shopping experience. During this process, they encountered a series of problems and challenges, such as complex multi-brand operations and management, complicated data systems, difficult implementation of AI and big data analytics under the existing architecture, as well as increased logistics investment and customer acquisition costs. SMU's original cloud service providers were unable to support SMU's cloud reconstruction and new service strategies. The traditional ECS architecture was unable to provide the rapid service elasticity they needed. The latency requirements of customers' online services could not be met because there was no local AZ.
Cloud native reconstruction of a traditional architecture has become their top priority.
Huawei Cloud is the only provider offering dual-city AZ nodes in Chile. This allows for rapid deployment of container clusters for SMU's cloud native reconstruction and provides a solid cloud foundation backed on big data and AI. During Christmas and Black Friday shopping promotions, SMU smoothly handled service surges. Huawei Cloud ensured service flexibility and elasticity for order peaks and provided strong support for rapid service innovation.
SMU has migrated their core SAP system to Huawei Cloud with S/4HANA deployed for significantly improved internal efficiency. The Huawei Cloud SAP solution provides higher scheduling accuracy, with an overall rating 13% higher than the industry average. It addresses SMU's challenges of complex multi-brand operations and low-latency requirements for all data. Huawei Cloud SAP uses the platform to continuously integrate people, finance, and materials. The platform enables closed-loop management of all service processes. It gives management processes a comprehensive upgrade.
SMU made changes to their eight logistics distribution centers, optimized the supply chain of their national store network and the seven brands it includes, and interconnected the payment system with the logistics ecosystem. By optimizing EWM warehouse management and the ERP system, SMU can schedule nearly 100 robots within 24 hours for unattended intelligent operations. An automatic logistics system has replaced the traditional "people find goods" mode of operations with an innovative "goods find people" system, helping them efficiently expand services.
SMU has published apps for their four brands in the Huawei App Gallery, and thanks to the large number of HMS users in Latin America, SMU can maintain and grow their existing user base. They enjoy platform traffic dividends and reduce customer acquisition costs.