When every hour of downtime costs your business two million dollars or more…

IT Technician with a Laptop Computer and Black Male Engineer Colleague are Talking in Data Center while Walking Next to Server Racks. Running Diagnostics or Doing Maintenance Work.

How do you strategically tackle complex IT transformation at scale?

Reinventing your IT operating model to fuel business flexibility, agility, and growth

As told by Renzo Hurtado, VP of Technology, Excellia - Grupo Romero

In partnership with Mariano Pizlo, Client Partner Executive, Kyndryl

From buying delicious groceries produced by Alicorp to fueling their cars with gas from Primax, Peruvians and their South American neighbors interact frequently with Grupo Romero. In total, the group owns conglomerates that operate more than 230 different businesses—and has ambitious plans to drive further expansion.

Following rapid growth through acquisition, as part of its innovation strategy, Excellia, center of excellence of Grupo Romero, inherited vast amounts of data, mismatched applications, and diverse IT infrastructure, all managed by a central IT team.

As managing so many diverse systems became more complex and costly, the internal IT team faced growing challenges in meeting the group’s dynamic business needs. As a result, many companies within the group struggled to achieve strategic growth.

Renzo Hurtado, VP of Technology at Excellia - Grupo Romero, outlines the challenge: “Within the group, a logistics company, bank, or food manufacturer will each have very different operating models. For each entity, how could we tackle sector-specific challenges, deliver excellent customer service, and adapt to evolving market forces?”

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“

Offering IT and enterprise resource planning services in a centralized manner limited the agility of each conglomerate and the companies they operate.”

Renzo Hurtado /

VP of Technology / Excellia - Grupo Romero

Bringing greater control and flexibility to individual businesses

To give each of the 14 conglomerates and subsidiary companies greater control over their IT environments, budgets, and growth plans, Grupo Romero wanted to decentralize its IT operating model, enabling the flexibility to better compete in diverse industries.

To ensure that IT teams serving each company could tailor their operating models to different markets, the group would rely on cloud-based infrastructure services as much as possible. This would significantly reduce the cost of procuring and maintaining on-premises IT equipment and related staffing costs.

The next hugely ambitious project would be to rearchitect the group’s single SAP ERP instance into three separate instances, one each for the group’s largest conglomerates. The separate ERP instances would then be adapted to the industry needs of the conglomerates, enabling the business applications to evolve flexibly.

Managing a complex system migration while maintaining business as usual

To empower its IT teams to add more value to each business, the company needed a technology partner to help optimize the foundational transformations.

Renzo Hurtado says: “Moving from the existing model was no easy task. To begin with, we were operating approximately 2,000 servers and a single, highly sophisticated SAP ERP instance containing over 30 years of data from hundreds of Excellia - Grupo Romero companies. We simply didn’t have the expertise and resources in-house to extract data from our existing systems and establish separate IT resources for our largest entities.”

Given that one hour of unexpected downtime can potentially cost the group up to nine million PEN (about US$ 2.3 million), Excellia - Grupo Romero was also keen to ensure that its IT transformation initiative could be completed with minimal disruption.

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Working with a trusted partner

“For a project of this scale, we needed a partner we could trust, and who could bring technological expertise and extensive industry experience,” says Renzo Hurtado. “Having worked with Kyndryl for over a decade, we knew they would be the perfect partner to help manage our end-to-end digital transformation.”

Together, Excellia - Grupo Romero and Kyndryl designed a new operating and governance model. This included the migration of up to 90 percent of systems from on-premises infrastructure to a modern, optimized environment on the AWS cloud.

“Kyndryl did an amazing job of managing the project through iterative stages and collaborating with multiple stakeholders to achieve optimal outcomes,” says Renzo Hurtado. “Most of all, Kyndryl helped us to minimize business disruption. We simply wouldn’t have been able to achieve this without Kyndryl.”

Excellia - Grupo Romero then engaged Kyndryl to manage its SAP “carve-out” project, which will establish a separate ERP instance for each conglomerate, tailored to the core needs of its subsidiaries.

What progress looks like:

23 %

Reduction in IT infrastructure costs

600

Physical servers migrated to the cloud

3000

Software vulnerabilities resolved

Excellia - Grupo Romero has already achieved significant savings since moving from a centralized IT operating model and has empowered each conglomerate to manage its own IT program and drive business development.

Renzo Hurtado says: “So far, we’ve reduced IT infrastructure costs by 23 percent. Crucially, we eliminated more than 600 physical servers by migrating to the cloud and adopted a new operating model without any unplanned downtime. All the projects Kyndryl helped with ran smoothly.”

Excellia - Grupo Romero:

Now enjoys the benefits of up-to-date hardware and software—contributing to improved performance and simplified maintenance, as well as strengthening its already robust security posture.
Continues to work closely with Kyndryl on its ERP carve-out initiative and anticipates even greater efficiencies across all back-office functions.

Renzo Hurtado concludes: “With cost-effective, reliable, and secure systems, backed by a decentralized IT governance model designed with support from Kyndryl, we can now focus on adding value to all the constituent companies in Excellia - Grupo Romero.”

“

Kyndryl helped us to uncover and resolve almost 3,000 software vulnerabilities as we moved to the new operating model, hardening our defenses against emerging cyberthreats.”

Renzo Hurtado /

VP of Technology / Excellia - Grupo Romero

About Grupo Romero

Established in 1976, Excellia - Grupo Romero owns 14 conglomerates with operations in multiple sectors, including consumer goods, agriculture, industrial services, energy, logistics, and banking. As one of the largest companies in Peru, Excellia - Grupo Romero is helping to drive environmentally sustainable growth across South America.