Brandbank Secures Retail Ops with Genero Cloud

Sydney, Australia – August 20, 2018 — Brandbank Group – acknowledged as one of Australia’s foremost brand-builders, owning Seed Heritage and under license with international specialty fashion brands such as French Connection and Nine West – has transformed its core retail information systems into a Software-as-a-Service with Genero Cloud. The service is running ‘live’ successfully since January 2018.

Thanks to careful planning and assistance from Four Js
our migration to the Cloud was a great success.

Tuan Do,
IT Manager,
Brandbank Group

In all, the group operates over 520 specialty fashions stores, including ‘concession stores’ within David Jones and Myer. These stores cover Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. Brandbank also has a significant global online business.

Core operations

The systems migrated to Genero Cloud include critical back-office retail functions such as: orders, distribution, inventory management, sales reporting, planning, and wholesale transactions.

Risk mitigation was a significant factor
in our decision to choose Genero Cloud

Anthony O’Brien,
CFO,
Brandbank Group

Business continuity

Motivation to outsource the administration and operations of these systems was driven by the need to improve business continuity.  An internal audit identified a serious weakness with recovery times in the event of a system failure – a big concern for senior management. Genero Cloud’s automatic backups, monitoring and warm disaster recovery address this issue and have dramatically improved uptime. Another key driver towards this service model was the desire to refocus IT resources on high-value application development to increase the Group’s competitive advantage.

Other benefits witnessed since going ‘live’:

  • The resolution of operational bottlenecks
  • Significantly faster processing and reporting
  • Improved productivity in satellite offices
  • Seamless transition for users

On-boarding

After analysis, Four Js developed a comprehensive transition plan providing a solution to cover the following areas:

  • Managed platforms
  • Managed databases
  • System monitoring with dashboards and alerts
  • Security
  • Capacity growth
  • Automated, secure backups
  • Replicated warm standby disaster recovery

During the ‘on-boarding’ process, Brandbank’s B2B and B2C connectivity requirements were analysed and remapped, as well as all interfaces to external applications and services. The solution includes three servers hosted in tier 1 data centers including: a production server, a development server and a disaster recovery server hosted in a different location by a different Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider.

Brandbank’s core systems are written with Genero and the IBM® Informix® database, running on the Red Hat® Linux® operating system.