Your Chain of Stores

Manufacturer of fashionable youth clothing. The company was established in 2002. It is part of a vertically integrated holding that combines cotton spinning, knitting and hosiery. YOUR chain of stores is over a hundred stores in the largest cities of Russia.

In December 2022, the Yours network changed its registration from Cyprus to the UAE.

IT passport

The company "YOURS" has been using data center outsourcing for about two years. Intelligent Enterprise talked with the head of its IT department Alexei Kartyshev about how this affected the company's latest IT projects.

Intelligent Enterprise: A little about the holding's history. How was development going? Was it originally formed in its current form or were businesses bought as needed?

Alexey Kartyshev: The whole history of the holding began with the Smolensk spinning mill. Under her, her stores have long worked, through which manufactured products were sold. And production was expanding. In addition to the production of yarn, weaving and sewing directions appeared.

As it grew, territorial expansion took place. Shops eventually reached Moscow, Kaliningrad, and Nakhodka. Now the retail chain has 450 outlets. They began to acquire enterprises in other regions. For example, several factories were bought in Shuya alone. Until 2008, all our products, from yarn to finished products, were produced only in Russia. Now the Russian share has decreased to 60 - 70%, the rest is ordered abroad, in China and India. Nevertheless, in our country we are one of a kind. And in the world, po­dobnykh companies are not so mno­go. Only the Italian "Benetton" went further than us, which has enterprises of the entire cycle of clothing production, starting from cotton cultivation.

Was the IT department in the company centralized initially or did each factory have its own services?

Organizational IT departments of each enterprise report to the central office in Moscow. The budget is also centrally drawn up. We develop mero­priyaty and project plans together.

However, all the enterprises we acquired after the purchase lived, and still live their lives. From the point of view of IT, only the factory in Smolensk is tied to us. All kinds of business process automation systems we did not lead to a common denominator. As a result, a situation has developed at the holding level as a whole, which is usually called the "zoo." For example, we use Microsoft Dynamics Nav as an accounting system. Other software is used in factories. Various 1C products are Aktiv­no operated.

We are conducting a project to implement Oracle E-Businness Suite modules. This is, in particular, the subsystems of commodity-financial and assortment planning, as well as commodity movement.

How did you come up with the idea of tsent­ralizatsii and consolidating IT? How much has this decision been influenced by the fact that different departments use different systems? And what role did the introduction of a "heavy" ERP product play here?

This solution was born independently of the Oracle E-Businness Suite implementation. In addition, we began to consolidate the IT infrastructure long before we began work on this project. And the consolidation of resources was required to fulfill the business tasks facing us.

Take, for example, a problem such as assortment planning. Previously, each enterprise manager solved this problem on his own. Until some point, it was possible. But the company is experiencing rapid growth, and the number of failures and errors that led to direct losses has increased sharply. It is known that the demand for clothes, underwear and knitwear is seasonal. There are collections and the volume of each must be counted. This can be done based on the volume of sales over the past years, using demand forecasting tools. At the same time, it should be borne in mind that in the spring-summer season the demand is traditionally higher than in the autumn-winter season.

Not so long ago, you completed a large-scale project to modernize the IT infrastructure. How was the equipment selected?

We held a tender. It examined the equipment of Fujitsu, HP and IBM. However, HP and IBM were unable to offer us the full range of services and services that we needed. In addition, Fujitsu looked more customer-oriented against the background of other suppliers. As a result, her decision was chosen. Naturally, Fujitsu both price indicators and warranty terms were offered at an interesting level for us.

We did not talk about purchasing equipment on RISC platforms. Now the level of reliability that can be achieved with the x86 platform is not lower, or even higher. The same company Fujitsu has been sushchest­vuyut FlexFrame solutions for business applications for quite some time SAP , and Oracle, as practice shows, they are in no way inferior to much more expensive systems based on RISC/EPIC architectures, and in some respects exceed them. But at the same time, the cost of them is lower, and it is much easier to find the necessary specialists. And the technological development of x86 is more dynamic. Plus, it is impossible to exclude collisions like what happened not so long ago between HP and Oracle, when the latter refused to support its products for the HP-UX platform. And who will guarantee that something similar will not happen to other vendors?

How did you come up with the idea of outsourcing? Have you used external services for a long time?

In 2010, we realized that it was simply unprofitable for us to build a data center on our own. This requires significant financial and time costs. Moreover, we did not even have premises to deploy equipment. And modern high-density systems have a considerable mass that many buildings cannot withstand. That is, we would have to carry out long and expensive construction work. And the business management was, let's say, not ready to bear additional capital costs.

In addition, the allocation of the necessary energy capacity is a serious and difficult problem. As a result, we decided to rent a counter in an external data center. By that time, the excitement in the data center outsourcing market, which was observed a year earlier, had subsided. Then, as you know, companies began an active movement in this direction in order to reduce the cost of renting premises. These processes, I recall, led to a noticeable increase in prices.

When choosing an outsourcing data center, we saw that it had reliable systems rezerv­nogo power supply, climate control and fire extinguishing and that it was sufficiently removed from potentially dangerous facilities. In addition, it was important for us to be able to work with multiple operators to organize at least two redundant communication channels.

What happened during the project, as it seems at first glance, corresponds to the private cloud model, at least in the approach to organizing the hardware infrastructure. Is that really the case?

Overall, yes. We can connect to our data center from anywhere in the world, provided, of course, that there is Internet access there. As for the benefits of operating application systems characteristic of cloud technologies, there are still problems that we cannot solve yet. For example, we have reached the limit on scaling our accounting system based on Microsoft Dynamics Nav, as a result, during peak loads, we have to manually manage it: turn something on, turn something off. But with any hardware base, we need a more powerful software podderzh­ka. That is why we started the process of implementing Oracle's ERP system.

We created a cloud solution for certain business tasks with an eye to solving both current and future needs. Equipment was purchased for them and will be purchased more. And the problem is often that cloud solutions are low-powered and their capabilities are rapidly outgrowing by growing companies. And even at all it turns out that the launch of the necessary applications is impossible in principle. For example, none of the public cloud services will guarantee that Oracle applications will work. From here, if not discontent, then disappointment can arise.

I must say, this is not edinst­vennyy reason for possible disappointments. For example, it is often said that the introduction of cloud technologies reduces the need for personnel. We didn't have that. Stores make up a significant part of jobs, and there the work of IT specialists comes down to support - to replace a failed monitor, a burned-out power supply, etc. The implementation of cloud solutions here, of course, will not affect in any way. The infrastructure is managed by the same people, they do not go anywhere.

How will you work around the problem if it turns out that certain applications do not work in the cloud or work, but badly? How relevant is this problem for you?

It is known that almost all 1C products work well in a virtual environment. But you can't say that about Microsoft Dynamics Nav or some Oracle products. However, the use of clouds does not mean that everything, without exception, must be transferred to a virtual environment.

We created a cloud based on solving specific problems. And all the software that we use will work in the cloud. Another thing is that not all of our software is transferred to a virtualized infrastructure. After all, the use of clouds does not exclude the possibility that the application will work on a physical machine, and not on a virtual one. However, the use of equipment up to ­ ­ of static power and channels of the required bandwidth guarantees that any software we have will work in a cloud environment with load redundancy. And we do not use software that cannot work in the cloud in principle, for example, outdated programs based on flat-file DBMS. Namely, these applications are the most problematic.

Another problem is file deposits on network drives. This is also relevant for us, because over time we plan to transfer the workplace to the cloud and infrastructure. But here the recipe is simple. You just need to move the information from the network drive to another place and wait for its owner to grab it or not. With a 95% probability, I can say that no. And in general, on network resources, a significant part is made up of catalogs of employees who have not worked for a long time, or information from many years ago, and draft. We do not remove it, especially since it is in demand, and the legislation often requires it. It is simply transferred to the tapes. There it can be stored as long as you like, almost indefinitely.

It is often said that the use of tapes is yesterday. You also use tape libraries. Why?

This is done for reliability reasons. In addition, we is­polzuyem dual, or hot, backup technology. The copy is first reset to the hard drive and only then to the tape. In this case, there is practically no loss in performance. And numerous stories about the loss of tapes are more likely from the field of horror stories. In addition, everything here depends on the organization of the process, but not on the technology itself. For example, we do not use third-party companies to transport tapes. And as the statistics of the same information leaks where the corresponding drives appeared, in the vast majority of cases the culprit was mail, courier service or transport company. We store tapes in the same data center, the services of which we use, albeit in another room. All proper storage conditions are provided there.

What are the plans to develop your projects?

As I said, we are planning to implement an infrastructure based on virtual workplaces. The project is still at a very early stage. Other works are going on in parallel. In particular, to create a video surveillance system in stores. Not so long ago, the pilot phase of the warehouse logistics automation project was completed. It is planned to replace the front office software used in our outlets.

The development of the online store is also planned. In the very near future, we plan to expand it, but this, quite possibly, will not be limited to.

History

2023: Bukvoed, Leroy Merlin, Yours and Eat at Home customer data leak

On June 8, 2023, it became known about a data breach to customers of four large companies in: Russia the online bookstore "," Pedant the construction store, "the Leroy Merlin culinary recipe portal" Eat at Home "and the clothing store". " Yours More. here