Featured content from our partner, Lenovo.
Who Is Opticas Devlyn?
Established in 1930s, Opticas Devlyn is a family-run optician service and eyewear retailer headquartered in Mexico City. With 1,500 stores throughout Mexico, it is one of Latin America’s largest and best-known optical retail chains. The company continues to invest in innovation and operates the largest laboratory in Latin America for cutting, beveling, and polishing corrective eyeglass lenses.
The Challenge
Committed to increasing the quality of life for its clients by improving their eyesight, Opticas Devlyn wants to continue enhancing service delivery both in-store and online. The recent pandemic accelerated the deeper integration of e-commerce into its working practices and its SAP ERP solution, and the company continues to evolve towards an omni-channel vision.
Ymir Castor, IT Lead at Grupo Devlyn, explains: “As new competitors emerge, we must capitalize on our 85-plus years of experience and keep enhancing our service. We gather large amounts of information to help our customers make the best choices, wherever and however they engage with us. We want to give our salespeople fast, reliable, and secure access to that information so that we can provide our customers with service that is fast but also high-quality. At the systems level, this means we need to have real-time data available at every point of interaction with customers, both in-store and online, without any degradation of service.”
“At Opticas Devlyn, everything we do leads up to that moment when the customer tries on their glasses and says, ‘Wow, I can see well!’ Working with Lenovo and dcloud gives us the reliable real-time processes and information that support this ability to delight our customers.” —Ymir Castor, IT Lead, Grupo Devlyn
Fast, Reliable, and Efficient Retail—Nationwide
Opticas Devlyn runs its critical systems on Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V2 servers powered by 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. The company has 450 virtual machines on both Hyper-V and VMware hypervisors split between two data centers, and a separate disaster-recovery landscape also on Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V2 servers. High-speed storage and networking are provided by Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series Storage Arrays and Lenovo ThinkSystem Switches respectively. The infrastructure hosts the SAP ERP platform together with its Db2 database, judged by IBM to be one of the largest online Db2 databases in the world.
Hardware
- Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V2 powered by 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors
- Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series Storage Arrays
- Lenovo ThinkSystem Switches
Software
- SAP ERP
“Lenovo products are crucial for Opticas Devlyn, but it’s also about the strategic partnership we have built with Lenovo,” says Castor. “We don’t feel like just another account: we discuss our needs and work together on transformation. Selecting Lenovo is one of the best decisions we ever made.”
Another essential ingredient in the solution is Lenovo Business Partner dcloud, which provides Opticas Devlyn with implementation and support services in addition to nationwide low-latency network connectivity.
“We operate across a very large country, so managing latency is complex and challenging,” says Castor. “The fact that we have sustained 100% service uptime for more than five years is thanks to both the reliability of the Lenovo hardware and the quality of service from dcloud.”
“Intel processor-based servers from competing vendors can seem very similar. But for Opticas Devlyn, there is no better option than Lenovo, because of the proven quality and performance over the long term.” —Ymir Castor, IT Lead, Grupo Devlyn
Results
Opticas Devlyn’s Lenovo platform helps the company achieve customer-centricity by making sure that key information and services are always available. Whether in-store or online, customers can get the appropriate advice from salespeople, can make decisions without delay, and can rapidly get the product or service they want.
“Reliability and high performance are crucial for our information systems,” says Castor. “When we complete a sale in our point of sale [POS] system, the information flows immediately through our ERP system and out to our strategic partners so that we can achieve high speed but also great quality. During the past 18 months, we’ve reduced transaction times by about 32%.”
Opticas Devlyn has also accelerated the set-up of new retail stores: when a new branch opens, salespeople can immediately access all of the information tools and systems. “This is a real point of competitive differentiation,” says Castor. “We can set up a POS, connect a wireless or cellular antenna, and off you go: you're selling.”
Working with Lenovo and dcloud, Opticas Devlyn is continuing to simplify and streamline its processes while trying to understand more about its customers. The company is integrating more information management tools—for example, its POS system is connected with Salesforce, BTex, and Qlikview analytics—and sales data flows seamlessly into its SAP BI environment to support decision-making.
“We want our customers to feel that they’re part of a simple and well-organized process, in which they don’t feel uncomfortable about sharing information because it’s clear that we’re using that to deliver better service,” says Castor. “Looking to the future, we’ll use AI tools to help us predict and anticipate customer needs.”
Opticas Devlyn is also deepening integration with its suppliers and working to improve the sharing of information between its physical and e-commerce channels. “The tools and technologies from Lenovo and dcloud are helping us to maintain our dynamism and keep making progress in how we serve the changing needs of our customers,” says Castor. “Without these partnerships, we would not be able to achieve this ongoing strategic transformation.”