For Lotte group, connections mean everything. It’s how a humble Korean founder and literary enthusiast named Shin Kyuk-ho began marketing bubble gum to kids in postwar Japan. It’s also how the company grew from bubble gum into a multi-national conglomerate, with a yearly revenue of $86 billion, that includes snacks, shopping malls, department stores, duty-free shops, theme parks, a baseball team, and the tallest skyscraper in Seoul.[i] It’s why Lotte Group chose Cisco SD-WAN.
Complexity and service issues spiked costs
With over 50 affiliates and R&D centers, it would be an understatement to say that Lotte Group operates in diverse industries. Their incredible scope and disparate business processes drove the need to simplify WAN operations. In addition, Lotte’s continued success came with the burden of heavy traffic on their traditional WAN, where any service interruptions, changes and upgrades required manual service. Lotte was also challenged with migration to cloud connectivity, as their architectures became more complex and less efficient with the advent of multicloud applications. Combined, these factors spiked IT costs. Management took notice.
Lotte Group identified two possible solutions: add more costly lines that would do little to resolve performance and visibility issues to the cloud, or deploy Cisco SD-WAN.
“Lotte Homeshopping was able to triple WAN bandwidth at less than half the cost, while Lotte Chilsung Beverage gained flexible infrastructure with three-layer safety and improved WAN bandwidth to support its shift to a cutting-edge smart factory environment. Lotte Hotels and Resorts was able to centralize control of its 17 domestic locations while gaining both flexibility and greater reliability.”
-Wang-seok Han, Head of IDC, Lotte Data Communication Company
Connecting industries: The Cisco SD-WAN solution
With Cisco SD-WAN, all of Lotte Group’s domestic and international affiliates, including major sites in Seoul and Busan, are now able to sustain their business innovation based on up-to-date network infrastructure.
Lotte Homeshopping was the first affiliate to adopt SD-WAN and has been producing tangible benefits ever since. Lotte Homeshopping currently enjoys three times the WAN bandwidth at less than half of the line cost by maintaining dedicated lines for core applications such as ERP and groupware, while other tasks such as analyzing external data is performed through the Internet.
Lotte Group then transformed its Chilsung Beverage Anseong plant into a smart factory through an investment of approximately 122 billion in KRW (South Korean Won). To Lotte, a cutting-edge beverage plant meant that all processes including business forecasting, beverage production, inventory management and retail be automated and managed in real-time on the network. Cisco SD-WAN provided these benefits, doubled the bandwidth, and ensured that the substantial automation traffic was easily processed. Cisco SD-WAN gave Lotte the ability to segment dedicated and Internet Service Provider (ISP) lines to provide a flexible and secure network infrastructure.
Lotte Hotels and Resorts streamlined its 17 branches with centralized management and automation. Cisco SD-WAN gave visibility across their network and allowed flexible utilization of both their dedicated lines and public Internet lines. With Cisco SD-WAN It can now apply uniform security policies to all of its branches and address any issues on its network in an agile manner through real-time detection. At the same time, Lotte Group managed to reduce its Hotels and Resorts line costs by more than 20%.
A lifetime of value, bringing prosperity to the World
Lotte Group considers itself a lifetime value creator. The company aims to bring prosperity to the entire world and extend its influence well beyond Asia to become a top, global company. Cisco SD-WAN is helping to connect Lotte Group across its industries, with more deployments planned, to help take it there.
- Read more about Lotte and their Cisco SD-WAN deployment.
- Check out how Cisco SD-WAN can help connect your business!
[i] Chloe, Sang-Hun, ‘Chewing Gum Tycoon’ of Lotte Group, Shin Kyuk-ho, Dies at 98, The New York Times, Jan 19, 2020, updated Jan 21, 2020
Love their Chilsung cider!
Excellent