Mexican Auto Collision Parts Distributor Grows with Red Hat for SAP

RADEC was founded in January 28, 1981 in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. It imports, markets, and distributes collision auto parts from the best manufacturers around the world. RADEC products are authorized and certified pursuant to rigorous quality standards. RADEC has grown consistently, and currently has three distribution centers and six business centers in Guadalajara, Monterrey, and Mexico. The company sells more than 14,000 different products for use in all Mexican car brands. RADEC is recognized for constantly innovating, including implementing an SAP system on an open source platform like Red Hat for the accurate control of its operations.

The company’s commitment to its customers and to providing quality products helped it experience constant growth—especially in the past few years. RADEC made the decision to upgrade its systems to manage large volumes of information to provide the availability the business needed during a high growth period.

The main challenge was to choose a stable, adjustable, and secure enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that could carry out different functions in one place, thus streamlining processes and shortening timelines while providing control. That is why they chose SAP R/3.

“Growth has caught up with us, and we need to evolve and innovate, so we chose an open source solution,” said Arturo Padilla, operations manager at RADEC.

They also wanted to implement ERP on a secure platform with a technological ally. In the past, they used the Unix-based UNICAJA system, so they decided to continue under the same server-based scheme but with a solution to reduce administrative operating costs, which they found in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

RADEC had a home-made solution, and, due to the constant growth of its operations and information management requirements, the company needed a more appropriate ERP solution. After analyzing several options, they found SAP to be a mature, and—above­all—secure solution.

“We needed to handle business information in real time on a daily basis for our decision making and we also had to be sure that this was run on a scalable but, most of all, high-availability platform.

This is why we chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux”, said Padilla.

The main criteria for choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux is high availability, the elimination of downtime, the zero cost of licensing compared to systems like Windows Server, and the experience system administrators had with Red Hat.

With support from Aleux, a Red Hat distributor, the implementation took six months and was successful.

“System stability and availability are unbeatable,” said Padilla.

From its implementation, RADEC managed to have 99.9% availability and the performance of its applications has not dropped more than 50%, which would have been impossible to achieve had they not sought out a platform capable of yielding these results.

One of the main advantages of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is that it allows RADEC to keep pace with business needs. “RADEC is currently evolving and we are convinced that the system we are working with can cope with this growth,” said Padilla.

The appropriate combination of world-class solutions has allowed business areas vital to RADEC’s operation to significantly reduce their response times, mainly in the commercial and financial industries.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux blends the security, scalability, and availability RADEC needed, which also allows it to easily see the updates of every server in a single place easily.

Also, according to RADEC, Red Hat Enterprise Linux cost 10 times less than other licensed platforms they reviewed.