2024-04-24 19:13:46
Retail company adopted Microsoft Fabric on the eve of Black Friday 2023 and managed to eliminate incidents and increase user satisfaction
Summary: To meet the demand for Black Friday 2023 (an important sales date) without setbacks, the Casas Bahia Group, with a long history in Brazilian retail, needed to increase its capacity to process an immense amount of data and dashboards. That’s when they were introduced to Microsoft Fabric and Autoscaling in Microsoft Power BI Premium. This powerful combination created the foundation used by the company to build a powerful new environment that would become synonymous with success and pioneer in Latin America.
The Casas Bahia Group, with more than six decades of history in Brazilian retail, aims to consolidate itself as an omnichannel relationship and consumption management platform, with the customer as the central element of its entire ecosystem. To this end, the group, formed by the brands Casas Bahia, Ponto, Bartira, Extra.com, banQi, Rede Celer, ASAPLog and CNT, offers consumers the possibility of using their services and products whenever, wherever and however they want.
An imminent challenge
Faced with a scenario of constantly growing demand, the Casas Bahia Group manages more than 3 thousand reports, distributed across 208 Power BI Premium workspaces. The team, which has a base of more than 12,000 active users, needed immediate access to valuable insights during the most important time of the year for commerce, enabling agile decision-making across all sectors of the organization.
With the arrival of Black Friday 2023 (an event that has become the main date for Brazilian retail trade – surpassing traditional holidays, such as Christmas and Mother’s Day), the Casas Bahia Group needed a solution capable of eliminating bottlenecks that impeded speed and scale in your data analysis environment. This is an essential element for the group’s strategy, in which reports are generated both for its sales team and for combating fraud. Regarding this scenario, data analyst Denisson Ferreira da Silva, who works directly on the Group’s front line, recalls: “we were coming from a period of putting out fires”.
An unexpected solution
The retailer needed to deal with the challenges it was facing daily due to the large volume of data, which usually reaches its peak during the promotional period. To this end, the Business Intelligence coordinator of the Casas Bahia Group, Fabíola Campos de Carvalho Rocha, asked Microsoft, about a month before Black Friday, for an increase in the base capacity of theMicrosoft Power BI Premium. However, the resolution would not come as imagined: “At the last minute, we understood that we would not have this extra capacity, and our alternative was to expand the processing capacity viaMicrosoft Fabric.”
As it was a new solution on the market, the team was concerned about the tool’s potential and its ability to meet the conglomerate’s needs during the main sales date.
From seizure to the first Microsoft Fabric success story in Latin America
The big test for Grupo Casas Bahia was to use, in a short space of time, a tool with which they were not familiar. “The challenge was enormous at the company’s most critical moment, which was Black Friday. Fear existed, but it did not paralyze us. We were going to do this and be successful!”, says Fabíola.
In the first months of the year, under the management of Renato Tironi da Silva, executive manager of Data Engineering, the first environmental assessment was carried out to better understand the gaps and points of opportunity for better consumption. With these points determined, a task force was created to map and implement “quick wins” for an evolution of the current environment. In this first phase, a better distribution of workspaces, cleaning of critical panels and a better implementation structure were implemented.
With the mapping and the first optimizations completed, the team implemented a center of excellence (CoE) with the best practices for the business areas. After this action, closer to Black Friday, the second stage of the process began with the support of a Microsoft data engineer.
With engineering support, the action plan was defined to guarantee the biggest national retail event. An environment for reporting was created in Microsoft Fabric, and in parallel, autoscaling in Power BI Premium was enabled for existing environments, redistributing workspaces between Microsoft Fabric and Power BI Premium to increase resiliency and processing capacity, minimizing the risk and impact of possible incidents.
The intuitive capabilities of Microsoft Fabric in the hands of a quality team
Casas Bahia Group’s BI and Analytics manager, Bruno Vinícius dos Santos, talks about the reception of Microsoft Fabric by the IT team: “We were very happy with the ease of adoption of the tool. With little time to study, we were able to quickly adopt the platform. We were reassured by the fact that we had already worked with the entire Microsoft package and the good support we had.”
In fact, this implementation took place quickly: they started the process on the Friday before the start of the critical Black Friday period. On Saturday, Microsoft Fabric environments were created and autoscaling in Power BI Premium was enabled. On Sunday, the work spaces were distributed and prepared for the start of promotions on Monday.
“We talked to the people at Microsoft before implementation, and they told us it would be very simple and intuitive. At the last minute, we needed to redistribute the loads. We activate the environment in Microsoft Fabric and create an environment there. We were apprehensive, as we thought it wouldn’t be as simple as we were told. But, literally, we went up the stairs, set it up and, on Monday morning, everything was fine!”, says Robson Soares de Oliveira, Business Analytics Coordinator at Grupo Casas Bahia.
User satisfaction and zero incidents with Microsoft Fabric
The project was successful and exceeded the expectations of all teams involved, from IT to physical store managers and group executives. It was a success from the point of view of environmental stability, reporting and use of data – in sales and on the fraud prevention front – which brought a huge gain by eliminating possible financial losses.
“There were no incidents and given the last minute setup this is an absolute success. We heard a lot of praise from the business areas about the stability of the environment”, says Robson Soares about the result of the project.
The executive manager of Advanced Analytics at the Casas Bahia Group, Glaucia Tatiana Ferrari, agrees: “Our success metric was to absorb the growth in Black Friday demand in a way that would go unnoticed by the areas. This would indicate to us that, in fact, the work was very well done. And that’s what happened. We just didn’t go completely unnoticed because the work was very well done and we received excellent feedback,” she says.
Do more with less
After the successful experience with Microsoft Fabric, the group’s IT team is focused on optimizing operations to generate savings. “We want to spend less and perform better”, says Bruno Vinícius dos Santos.
“The Casas Bahia Group has a very strong team that makes it happen. They were able, in a short time, to add Microsoft Fabric to existing Microsoft Power BI Premium environments to meet Black Friday, creating a successful model.”, concludes Fabio Dias, Customer Success account manager at Microsoft Brazil.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft)’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Present in 190 countries, with 122 subsidiaries, the company is a leader in innovation and the development of promising technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud applications. In Brazil for 35 years, Microsoft has an ecosystem of more than 25 thousand partners. In this way, the company maintains a robust, highly efficient business structure, which also has a Transparency Center, which aims to promote reliable and secure computing, the Advanced Technology Laboratory (ATL – Advanced Technology Lab), and the Microsoft Technology (MTC – Microsoft Technology Center), in operation in Brazil since January 2012. With the aim of contributing to actions capable of preparing professionals for the digital economy, reducing inequalities and promoting inclusion in the country, Microsoft also launched in 2020 the Microsoft Mais Brasil Plan, which has, among its pillars, the training of professionals for the technology market, an essential condition for promoting the digital transformation of Brazilian companies. From July 2020, when the Mais Brasil plan was established, until March 2024, 12.5 million people were reached with different free professional qualification and requalification initiatives.
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