With the support of Microsoft Azure Cloud to intelligently store and manage data, in addition to machine learning algorithms, the company developed an environment called Self Service to support its data-driven decision-making process.
Riachuelo, a major fashion retailer in Brazil, found in Microsoft Azure Cloud a tool to build a data-centric operation. With over 70 years of history and 40,000 employees, the company has an industrial park, two factories, approximately 350 stores and over 30 million Riachuelo card customers. With this extension, the company's challenge was to find a solution that would cover the entire company and could be used by each business area to support its data-driven decision-making process.
Enhancing Data Governance with Cloud Support
As part of a digital transformation process and the search for a data-centric operation, in 2020 the company decided to develop a new environment to improve the company's data governance, a corporate data lake with AI algorithms and support from the Microsoft Azure cloud.
“We designed the cloud environment so that our areas could count on more computing capacity and support for decision-making through data and artificial intelligence,” said Rodrigo Franco, Head of Data at Riachuelo.
With the intention of bringing innovation to improve the work of several areas, such as CRM, Sales, Marketing and the company's financial arm, Midway, Riachuelo developed an environment called “Self Service”. “In about two months, we carried out a migration work with the business areas of more than 250 processes that were previously stored in an on-premises environment”, adds Rodrigo.
Modern and innovative data architecture
The company used Azure Data Lake Storage, a service that allows storing and performing parallel transformations on a large volume of data, and Azure Data Factory, a fully managed serverless data integration tool – which eliminates the need to manage servers – for ingesting, preparing and transforming all data at scale in data collection.
Governance also relies on Azure Databricks, an environment that facilitates the creation, training, management and deployment of machine learning and deep learning models at scale, as well as Azure Event Hubs, a managed real-time data ingestion service that is scalable, secure and simple to operate.
The intelligence layer also brings together Azure Synapse, a capability that provides a significant upgrade in the ability to process large volumes of structured data at once, along with MLOps, accelerating the machine learning process from model development to deployment.
Finally, the visualization of all this data processing is carried out by Power BI, Microsoft's Business Intelligence service, and the management of its data catalog and glossary by Azure Purview, a data governance service that classifies and promotes automated management.
A new reality in data governance
The solution has already proven fruitful on the first Black Friday after adoption, when Riachuelo saw a reduction in process analysis time of more than 50%, and the cloud provided scalability and cost reduction for the operation.
“At first we felt a bit strange, which is normal. Now, IT has joined the project, we have great support from the Microsoft team with weekly meetings, and this has brought more comfort to the user areas,” said Rodrigo.
The migration process has already reached 18 areas of the company, bringing more security and access to a structured data environment, with tracking and delivery, providing support for decision-making processes and compliance with the General Data Protection Law (LGPD).
With the solution, several areas reap benefits, such as the analysis of the sales profile of each store, with commercial intelligence and automation of the replenishment and stock areas, in addition to the customer relationship area that optimized the segmentation of target audiences for customers of physical stores and e-commerce.
“With the platform, we are able to have a complete view of the public, what type of campaign to approach for each one according to their profiles and, thus, increase our sales return and loyalty”, says Rodrigo.
The platform also strengthens the operations of Midway, the company's financial arm, with digital account services, responsible for managing the Riachuelo card, with greater precision in the predictive models that guide the company's credit scoring projects. "All business areas have the autonomy and security to enter the system and access the data that is interesting for that operation, always taking into account issues such as security and LGPD", highlights Rodrigo.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) creates AI-powered platforms and tools to deliver innovative solutions that meet the evolving needs of our customers. The technology company is committed to making AI widely available and doing so responsibly, with a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. In Brazil for 35 years, the company launched the Microsoft Mais Brasil Plan in 2020 with the aim of supporting the country’s sustainable economic development, contributing with actions capable of preparing professionals for the digital economy, reducing inequalities and promoting digital inclusion.
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