Riachuelo implements corporate data lake on Azure and enhances its data governance

One of the largest fashion retailers in Brazil, Riachuelo has over 70 years of history and 40,000 employees. With an expressive industrial park, it brings together two factories, one in Natal and the other in Fortaleza, in addition to approximately 350 stores and more than 30 million customers on the Riachuelo card. 

Enhance data governance with cloud support

As part of a digital transformation process and the drive to work with 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 Microsoft Azure cloud support. 

"We designed the cloud environment so that our areas could rely on more computing capacity and decision-making support through data and artificial intelligence," said Rodrigo Franco, Head of Data at Riachuelo.

With the intention of bringing innovation to improve the work of various areas, such as CRM, Commercial, Marketing, and the company's financial arm, Midway, Riachuelo developed an environment called "Self Service.” "In about two months, we did a migration job 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 it to store and perform parallel transformations on a large volume of data, and Azure Data Factory, a fully managed serverless data integration tool for ingestion, preparation, and transformation of all data at scale in data collection. 

Governance also features Azure Databricks, an environment that makes it easy to create, train, manage, and deploy 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 functionality 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 development to model deployment.

Finally, visualization of all this data processing is performed by Power BI, Microsoft's Business Intelligence service, and management of its catalog and data glossary by Azure Purview, a data governance service that classifies and promotes automated management.

A new reality in data governance

The solution already proved fruitful on Black Friday 2020, when Riachuelo had a reduction in process analysis time by more than 50%, and the cloud granted scalability and cost reduction for the operation.

"In the beginning we had a bit of strangeness, which is normal. Now, IT has joined the project, we have great support from the Microsoft team with weekly meetings, and this has given 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 subsidies for decision-making processes and compliance with the General Data Protection Law (LGPD).

With the solution, several areas reap the benefits, such as the analysis of the sales profile of each company store, with commercial intelligence and automation of the replacement and inventory areas, as well as the customer relationship area that optimized the segmentation of target audiences for store and e-commerce customers.

"With the platform, we were able to get a complete view of the public, what type of campaign to address for each according to their profiles and thus increase our return on sales and loyalty," says Rodrigo.

The platform also strengthens the operation of Midway, the company's financial arm, with digital account services, responsible for Riachuelo's card management, with more precision in the predictive models that guide the company's credit scoring projects. "All business areas have the autonomy and security to enter into the system and access the data that are interesting for that operation, always taking into account issues such as security and LGPD," Rodrigo points out.

By the end of 2021, the company intends to have corporate Data Lake as a single source of information for the entire company, with a modern data environment that can be used in every operation.