Founded in 1997, FAW Car, a subsidiary of the FAW Group Corporation, was China’s first listed share-holding company in the domestic car manufacturing industry, developing, manufacturing, and selling passenger cars and accessories. In its first 15 years of operation, it built and sold over 1.4 million vehicles, expanding annual production for the period by 12x—from 20,000 vehicles to 240,000 vehicles—and growing sales revenue six-fold. FAW Car’s main product lines include Hongqi, Besturn, Oley, and Mazda, and it plans to launch additional products in the future.

FAW Car was running its core business system, an in-house-developed enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, on multiple minicomputers and PC servers. As vehicle production and sales expanded, its legacy IT infrastructure struggled to handle data due to an increased volume in ERP transactions, which affected business performance. Furthermore, FAW Car needed to improve process efficiency, such as running reports for its financials and finished vehicles and parts manufacturing, to support its business expansion.

By consolidating 20 legacy microcomputers and multiple PC servers onto Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud—running on Oracle WebLogic Server—FAW Car gained a high-performing, reliable, flexible, and scalable cloud-based platform for its business-critical ERP applications. With Oracle Exalogic’s built-in load-balancing feature, the company has maximized system performance and accelerated user response time. FAW Car can now generate reports—including financials and bills of materials reports, and those for categories of goods manufactured, such as suburban utility vehicles (SUV) or multipurpose vehicles—up to 15x faster, improving operating efficiency. This, in turn, has enabled each business department to make quicker, better-informed decisions and to meet rapidly changing demand in the passenger-vehicle market, so FAW Car can support business growth over the next five years.

Using Oracle Exalogic’s out-of-the-box solution also enabled FAW Car to complete the deployment in just three-and-a-half days, and minimized implementation costs and risk. Oracle Exalogic’s easy-to-use configuration and diagnostic tools also simplified system management and maintenance tasks, enabling the company to improve IT-resource efficiency. As a result, FAW Car eliminated costs for hiring partners to maintain the system and further reduced its total cost of ownership.