Customer

Mattel Drives Direct to Consumer Digital Transformation and Project Barbiecore, Powered by DevOps TDM

 

Overview 

To support its mission of delivering innovative and enriching experiences for children, Mattel needed to evolve how it managed core business systems. With growing demands across its supply chain, direct-to-consumer (DTC), and B2B operations, Mattel launched a major modernization initiative to accelerate operations and support its expanding entertainment and IP-driven business. By implementing Perforce Delphix’s data virtualization and automation platform, Mattel dramatically reduced data refresh times, minimized hardware requirements, and increased operational agility. The results: faster releases, improved data accessibility, and scalable, future-ready environments. 

The Results at a Glance 

  • Reduced data refresh times from up to 5 days to 4–8 hours
  • 600–800% reduction in person-hours needed for environment support
  • 67% reduction in storage, from 12TB to 3.9TB using virtualized data
  • Hardware cost savings through virtualization and dynamic provisioning
  • Cloud-readiness through environment virtualization 

These outcomes enabled Mattel to streamline operations, respond faster to business needs, and deliver higher-quality products across all channels. 

The Challenge 

As a global leader in toys and entertainment, Mattel faced growing pressure to modernize its legacy systems to support rapid business transformation. The company needed to evolve its end-to-end operations to stay competitive and support expansion across supply chain, DTC, and B2B channels. 

Two core systems — Mattel’s legacy ERP and warehouse management system (WMS) — had become bottlenecks. Environment refreshes took anywhere from 2 to 5 days, slowing delivery and hampering agility. Hardware procurement further delayed efforts, while the high storage footprint limited scalability. Supporting these processes required extensive manual work, leaving teams stretched thin. 

The Solution 

To break through these bottlenecks and support business growth, Mattel implemented the Perforce Delphix platform to virtualize, automate, and streamline data delivery. 

  • Accelerated Database Refreshes: Reduced environment refresh time from 5 person-days to just 4–8 man-hours.
  • Virtualized Infrastructure: Replaced physical hardware with on-demand virtual databases, dramatically reducing infrastructure costs.
  • Smaller Footprint: Consolidated 12TB of physical storage to just 3.9TB of virtualized data across critical applications.
  • Elastic Environments: Enabled teams to spin up or down environments as needed — with no hardware depreciation or procurement delays.
  • Cloud-Readiness: Created a “cozy mode” for eventual cloud migration by virtualizing environments ahead of schedule. 

Looking Ahead 

With Perforce, Mattel is no longer constrained by hardware limitations or outdated processes. The company can deliver higher-quality products faster, better support its internal business partners, and prepare for cloud transformation — all while aligning with its larger mission to entertain and inspire through innovation.