Diamond Group facilitates business continuity with Veeam, supercharging their journey to become a world-class fast-moving consumer group company

The business challenges

Established in 1974 as an ice cream producer, PT Diamond Food Indonesia, better known as Diamond Group, has undergone expansive growth to become one of the top companies and integrated platform providers for branded food and beverages in Indonesia. Diamond Group is an industry leader with a market share of 95% in Indonesia. As part of a commitment Diamond Group made in 2015 to deliver Digital Transformation and further enhance its business operations, the company’s IT is continuously working toward scalability and compliance to regulations, while ensuring business continuity.

However, Diamond Group’s legacy infrastructure was unable to accommodate all the business needs and automate business processes. Their capacity management was also not well-managed and the user experience was neither optimal nor equally distributed.

Since Diamond Group has to process 30,000+ orders on a daily basis, plus 40,000+ invoices and shipments of over 90,000 orders to all 34 provinces in Indonesia, just an hour of downtime would have tremendous impact on business operations. This can lead to considerable losses in revenue and reputation, which is unacceptable to Diamond Group.

Norman Chen, President Director of PT Diamond Food in Indonesia said: “The biggest potential impact is the business disruption to Diamond Group’s ecosystem and supply chain. Middle-tier cafes with inventories that would usually last for just one or two days could see their operations halted if downtime is not immediately resolved.”

In 2019, as preparation for IPO, Diamond Group embarked on their Digital Transformation journey, which is an integral part of the company’s business resilience and continuity.

“We once suffered from corrupted data due to the lack of a capable backup solution,” said Joanito Iwan, CTO at Diamond Group. “The incident caused our business to stop, and we incurred countless losses in terms of transactions.”

“We decided to overhaul our legacy IT infrastructure and build a new one that offered increased manageability and reliability,” said Joanito. “We were using HPE Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) and HPE SimpliVity to help us streamline and scale efficiently. This plan provided a set of advanced functionalities that enable improvements to the efficiency, management and performance, all at a fraction of the cost and complexity of today’s traditional infrastructure stack. At the same time, we also needed a more robust solution for backup and replication to ensure 24/7 availability to accelerate our business processes as a whole.”

Traditional backups could not accommodate this backup strategy in the new IT infrastructure. This was problematic, since it would take two to three days to back up open databases and restore critical applications. Diamond Group’s business demands for quick restoration times were left unfulfilled.

With the simple integration of Veeam + HPE solutions, not only is our data protected, but applications can be up and running with no disruption.

The Veeam Solution

Choosing Veeam Backup & Replication was a strategic decision made in-line with the company’s greater vision. This deployment started in 2020, and has since enabled Diamond Group to strengthen their system and infrastructure landscape to address future needs. It also supports the master data that serves as the DNA of their entire system.

“Instant VM Recovery helps us improve Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and minimize disruption and downtime across different business environments. It ensures intelligent and automatic backup and recovery, which offers the ease of monitoring from a single console,” said Joanito. “As a result, our downtime is so short that we almost don’t notice them, which leaves productivity untouched and prevents our business from accruing both tangible and intangible losses. This also increased our customer satisfaction level by 90%.”

With Veeam in place, Diamond Group’s IT can now back up at the file level in virtualized environments and improve RPO by 98%, which increased operational efficiency and reduce cost. These improvements increased the IT team’s confidence level in formulating a solid business plan for moving to a fully automated business operation.

Joanito also said that the most fundamental reason they rely on Veeam is due to its technological reliability and ability to work with HPE’s HCI technology and achieve their SLA of no more than 18 hours of downtime per year.

Previously, Diamond Group’s tele-sales team had to do 80% of administrative jobs manually, which included everything from collecting, receiving, processing and completing orders to reporting. When Diamond Group started to implement robotic solutions to reduce the time spent on manual administrative tasks, Veeam’s technology helps ensure data accuracy and reliability, which is critical for maintaining high business efficiency and productivity.

“As part of the company’s commitment, we build our infrastructure for the long-term,” said Norman. “The technology providers we trust as partners should be companies with a proven track record. The reliability of Veeam Backup & Replication to support Diamond Group’s core IT infrastructure has been very satisfying for us. Its reliability has been proven to ensure business continuity of our always-on, 24/7 business operations and has contributed to our revenue growth consistently, despite the current global situation. In fact, we managed to enjoy double-digit growth thanks to a smart IT infrastructure we built.”

In 2020, Diamond Group even embarked on their new journey as a publicly traded company. This commitment was also part of their journey to become a world-class digital company in the consumer goods industry.

The Results

• Offered an automated, secure backup and recovery strategy which improved overall system availability and RPO by 98%.
  With Veeam in place, Diamond Group’s IT can now back up at the file level in virtualized environments in a way they couldn’t before. This improved RPO by 98% and added unmatched efficiency to operational and cost reductions. The company’s improved system availability has increased their IT team’s confidence level in formulating a solid business plan toward the realization of a fully automated 24/7 business operation.
• Helped IT in achieving SLAs of no more than 18 hours downtime per year.
  With its reliability and ability to work with HPE’s HCI technology, Veeam plays a fundamental role in achieving SLAs for downtime tolerance at maximum of 18 hours in a year, including planned downtimes for maintenance and other needs.
• Improved customer satisfaction by 90%.
  With the automated backup and restoration in place, Diamond Group’s IT can ensure an always-on, 24/7 business operation, which, in the end, improved business continuity and customer satisfaction by 90%.