Brother Commercial Drives Sales and Customer Satisfaction

Brother Commercial (Thailand) Ltd. is a subsidiary of Brother International. A leading brand that produces innovative products for the print and imaging, labelling, and sewing markets, Brother serves some of the biggest distributors and channels in Thailand and Laos. With two Pure Storage FlashArray™ systems, the company easily supports its Microsoft SQL database and asynchronous backup replication. Its lean IT team relies on Pure1 for cloud-based management plus predictive analytics and machine learning to identify and resolve issues before they affect customers. Leveraging its new data platform, Brother Commercial can pursue critical projects including AI and a dealer portal for rapid access to promotions and campaigns.

Brother Commercial (Thailand) is a trusted brand that places customers at the heart of its business, The company prioritizes meeting the diverse needs of customers through its comprehensive range of quality solutions. To drive sales and customer satisfaction, Brother runs a range of applications, which require the storage and analysis of varied data sets.

Brother Commercial (Thailand) Ltd. is a subsidiary of Brother International. A leading brand that produces innovative products for the print and imaging, labelling, and sewing markets, Brother serves some of the biggest distributors and channels in Thailand and Laos.

Brother leverages customer relationship management (CRM) data to mine new business opportunities and gather customer insights. The company also requires constantly updated information on inventory and supply-chain developments from its headquarters in Japan to optimise operational efficiency. Having Pure Storage’s advanced data platform allows Brother Commercial (Thailand) to sync seamlessly with the Japan-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, ensuring that the Thailand team can manage its inventory quickly and accurately.

“With Pure Storage, we can monitor utilization of our applications and conduct analysis on various data points, such as those created through recurrent transactions. Leveraging Pure Storage’s high performing data platform, we are now able to pursue critical future projects,” says Peradon Tanvanaratskul, IT Manager at Brother Commercial (Thailand).

Apart from standard applications, Brother is pioneering the analysis of big data from channels, partners, and dealers, to make recommendations about customer behavior and levels of demand in the market. To achieve this, Brother first has to consolidate data into one platform to increase data accuracy. Moving forward, Brother plans to have a big data module as well as roll out analytic applications. Tanvanaratskul adds, “This is a huge project we’re embarking on. Pure Storage’s infrastructure is important, as it supports our critical data needs such as consolidation. We’re now able to explore new ways to make data work for us and pursue future projects.”

Anticipating future technology needs and data requirements, Brother decided to switch from its previous storage solution to Pure Storage and adopt all-flash storage. “We recognize that the landscape is changing and foresee new technology challenges. We have a long-term vision to be well-prepared for what comes next, and believe flash storage is the way forward,” says Tanvanaratskul.

Preparing for upcoming customer needs, the group is rolling out a dealer portal, which runs on Pure Storage. Dealers can access the portal swiftly to learn about promotions and campaigns. At the same time, the company can run data analysis on the portal. Brother currently has three virtual machines (VMs) for the portal and plans to scale up the virtualisation.

Having completed a pilot of the portal, Brother is now gathering feedback on system reliability and speed. “Our customers are very happy with the system, and we’re excited to roll it out further. We have 10 users on the portal now and aim to scale to 200 through our deployment of Pure Storage,” says Tanvanaratskul.

Looking ahead, Brother foresees leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to cater to the specific IT needs of its customers and believes Pure Storage’s solutions will pave the way for adoption of AI in its local office.