How Red Hat and Microsoft helped Grupo Logístico Andreani address a rapid increase in demand

Grupo Logístico Andreani

Grupo Logístico Andreani, a leading logistics company in Argentina, needed to distribute critical products including pharmaceuticals and basic necessities to keep the country supplied through the mandatory social isolation period during COVID-19. Andreani used Microsoft Azure Red Hat^Ⓡ OpenShift^Ⓡ to maintain uninterrupted service – completing the adoption process in less than a week to enable it to meet a 35% increase in volume demand.

Operating in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, Grupo Logístico Andreani manages logistics and e-commerce solutions for industries with high added value and works with more than 300 client companies across pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, technology, financial services, and telecommunications.

2022 Red Hat Innovation Awards honorable mention

Just weeks after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic in March 2020, Andreani experienced a 35% increase in demand – a volume it had not anticipated reaching until 2023. At the same time, the organization was faced with mandatory quarantine restrictions that hampered its ability to carry out operations. The company needed a fast, efficient, and more secure way to expand its operating and processing capacity to avoid service delays or interruptions. While meeting the rapidly rising demand, it also needed to meet contractual obligations to avoid financial penalties and sustain its reputation, service quality, and customer satisfaction levels.

Andreani was already making improvements toward more flexible operations, but COVID-19 presented challenges for which it wasn’t fully prepared. The company began its digital transformation journey in 2018 with Red Hat OpenShift, as well as embracing hybrid cloud with Microsoft Azure, so it could modernize its applications through containers and microservices to meet the company’s need for flexibility and to make changes faster.

Andreani had worked with Microsoft and Red Hat separately for years. Andreani had already been working with Microsoft on a hybrid cloud strategy with Microsoft Azure to reduce on-site infrastructure. It chose Red Hat OpenShift, in part, to manage containers and microservices independently of the underlying hybrid cloud deployment. To keep up with demand, Andreani adopted Azure Red Hat OpenShift, standardizing the carrier route for its logistics operations. 

Azure Red Hat OpenShift is jointly designed, operated, and supported by Red Hat and Microsoft. The companies work together to manage the infrastructure, which lets Andreani's teams focus on developing and delivering solutions. Since Andreani uses OpenShift across its public and private cloud infrastructure, it has a layer of abstraction to move its services from one instance to another. 

It took Andreani around a month to ready its proof of concept to move workloads dynamically from its on-site OpenShift to Azure Red Hat OpenShift, and test out implementation.

Software and Services

Red Hat® OpenShift®

Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift

Using Azure Red Hat OpenShift, Andreani was able to improve systems with better security and agility, while meeting the 35% increase in volume demand and maintaining existing commitments. Without it, implementing a new OpenShift cluster to handle demand would have taken three to four weeks; this solution enabled Andreani to run workloads in around an hour.

The speed at which this challenging goal was accomplished was largely due to the collaboration between Andreani, Red Hat, and Microsoft working together as a team. This solution has also allowed Andreani to scale as needed based on business demand, with the flexibility of using both on-site and cloud resources. The efficient, demand-based expense management, and accelerated IT service delivery greatly improved user experience. The next step in their digital transformation journey will be to update OpenShift versions in its datacenter to scale horizontally and move hybrid cloud workloads dynamically.

Andreani sees the benefits go far beyond revenue. More than 300 clients, 5,000 users, and more than 2 million recipients received improved quality of service amid one of the most challenging global crises caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.