Americanas Sa's Transformation to an Analytics-Driven Culture with Google Cloud
Technology Category
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
- Sensors - Temperature Sensors
Applicable Industries
- Consumer Goods
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Quality Assurance
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Construction Management
- Infrastructure Inspection
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Training
About The Customer
Americanas sa is a technology innovation platform that emerged from the merger of Lojas Americanas and B2W Digital’s operations. The company aims to deliver the best omnichannel consumption experience in Brazil. It operates over 1,700 brick-and-mortar stores and several ecommerce platforms, including brands such as Americanas, Submarino, Shoptime, and Sou Barato. With more than 90 million registered customers and over 46 million unique users, Americanas sa has a wide-ranging brand portfolio and a constantly growing audience. The company uses data analytics to understand and improve the shopping journey of its diverse audience spread throughout Brazil.
The Challenge
Americanas sa, a Brazilian retail giant, faced a significant challenge in delivering the best customer experience across its 1,700+ physical stores and ecommerce platforms. The company, which emerged from the merger of Lojas Americanas and B2W Digital, had a diverse audience spread across Brazil, with over 90 million registered customers and 46 million unique users. Data analytics was crucial to understanding and improving the shopping journey of this diverse audience. However, the company's data environment, initially hosted on physical servers, was unable to keep pace with its expansion rate. The infrastructure lacked the maintainability and scalability needed to manage the growing data volume. The business required more efficiency to test hypotheses, validate concepts, and assist in decision-making processes. In 2017, the company decided to migrate its data environment to the cloud to improve scalability, governance, security, and speed.
The Solution
After a thorough technical assessment of the market's three main providers, Americanas sa chose Google Cloud for its big data and analytics solutions. The data migration process, which took place over six months in 2018, was complex due to the size of the company's data environment. Google Cloud's experts assisted at every stage of the process and provided training to Americanas sa's professionals. The new data platform in the cloud comprised a series of ingestion, storage, processing, and data analytics tools from Google Cloud, such as App Engine, BigQuery, and Dataflow. This allowed the engineering team to focus on creating and managing data layers rather than maintaining infrastructure, thereby increasing employee productivity and adding value to the business. The platform also democratized access to data and improved governance. The company also adopted Dialogflow, a tool that uses artificial intelligence to provide more natural and richer conversational experiences, to develop its virtual assistant.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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