BRUSSELS, BELGIUM – 22 April 2022 – Soda, the provider of data reliability tools and observability platform, has been chosen by Americanas S.A., one of Brazil’s largest retailers, to bring trusted data to its rapidly growing retail innovation platform. Soda will provide end-to-end data observability and reliability across Americanas S.A.’s operations, supporting enhanced innovation, automation of processes, maximized revenue opportunities, and a unified digital commerce experience for its customers.
The commerce world is witnessing a rise in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), with merchants turning to innovative technologies to cut costs, improve operations, increase efficiency, and deliver improved customer experience (CX). According to Gartner Digital Commerce Predicts 2022, by 2025 organizations offering a unified, data-driven commerce experience by frictionlessly moving customers through a shopping journey can expect to see at least 20% uplift in total revenue. Automation is also helping to enhance services, reduce delivery times, and provide cost-effective solutions for repetitive tasks across business functions, and data is underpinning the entire transformation.
With more than 51 million e-commerce customers and 3,500 physical stores, Americanas S.A. is Brazil’s leading retail innovation platform with a reputation for exceptional customer service and rapid distribution of products. Reflecting the transformation that is taking place across digital commerce, Americanas S.A.’s entire retail offering is built on data which informs both the company’s ability to recommend and sell the right products to the right people, and its mission to deliver a unified commerce experience for an incredibly diverse customer base across Brazil. As the company has grown, however, so too has the complexity of managing an ever-increasing volume of data on an ongoing basis, something which is critical to ensure that data is both accurate and readily available across the organization.
Soda helps Americanas S.A. address these challenges with an integrated platform that supports the discovery, prioritization, and resolution of data issues before they have an impact downstream. As any business evolves in response to customer and market demand, so too does their data at a rate which is difficult to keep pace with. Data passing through an organization inevitably undergoes changes as a result of things like software upgrades, schema changes, transformation bugs, or human error, which damages its quality and impedes trustworthiness. Soda automatically scans for issues like these, with open source (OSS) testing and validation tools built by data engineers who are part of its global data community. An intuitive and comprehensive workflow then helps teams across Americanas S.A.’s organization to detect and collaboratively resolve problems, with alerts bringing issues to the right people at the right time.
“The modern retail environment has changed, and for organizations like Americanas to continue offering the best possible commerce experience, we are reliant on AI and ML powered digital engines that sit behind our retail platform. This platform is a dynamically changing entity which needs to be managed in real-time to ensure that we’re adapting to changing conditions and not suffering from errors which impact accuracy and degrade overall performance,” explained Tiago Andrade, Head of Big Data & AI, Americanas S.A. “Soda gives us the end-to-end observability we need to be more confident about the data that is feeding our engines, meaning that instead of being reactive to issues, we can take a much more proactive approach based on an entirely accurate picture of the health of our data.”
Behind its exponentially-growing retail operation, Americanas S.A. has created one of the most sophisticated cloud-based data platforms in the industry. Through Soda, the company has now introduced the visibility and control it needs to get ahead of issues in its data-intensive digital environment and build lasting trust in the data. Time to value since the deployment has been rapid, with Americanas S.A taking just four weeks to launch a pilot in time for Black Friday, meaning that the company was able to rely on the quality and security of its data quality for critical decision-making during this important e-commerce sales period. Americanas S.A. makes tens of millions of sales every minute during Black Friday with the impact of inaccurate or flawed data having the potential to significantly change results.
“To understand the changing needs of customers and embrace new opportunities, retailers need to rely on data strategies based on AI and ML technologies to differentiate their brands through improved personalization, better customer experience, and optimized demand forecasting. Without access to good quality data, however, these strategies are being built on unreliable foundations,” explained Maarten Maaschelein, CEO & Co-founder, Soda. “Americanas S.A is a digital organization that truly understands this opportunity, and for that reason, we’re proud that Soda has been chosen as a core component within its data architecture. Soda was built to meet the needs of digital organizations in data-intensive environments such as retail, where trust in data is needed at both scale and speed to differentiate from the competition.”
Over the next few months, Americanas S.A. will be rolling out Soda across every data pipeline, guaranteeing that every business unit and development team is empowered to take action to identify and resolve data issues before they impact the business.
About Americanas S.A.
Americanas S.A. is a Brazilian retailer born with the purpose of bringing together the best in the world to improve people’s lives. We are a technological innovation platform capable of delivering an omnichannel consumer experience that is increasingly fluid and surprising, with infinite possibilities, which accelerates our growth and makes us more agile. We have a unified base of 51 million active customers; more than 40 thousand members; over 137 million items available; 3 million partners, including: suppliers, sellers and merchants; and 2.5 million m² of total area among more than 3,500 physical stores and franchises; 25 distribution centers and 215 operational logistics units (hubs). With the union of our platforms, services and brands, it is safe to say that we are present in the daily lives of all Brazilian families.
About Soda
Soda is the provider of Open Source data reliability tools (OSS) and Cloud Data Observability Platform that enable data teams to discover, prioritize, and resolve data issues. Soda’s mission is to bring everyone closer to the data and enable confident decision-making with reliable, high-quality data. The Soda global data community already counts Disney, HelloFresh, and Udemy as major contributors to have deployed Soda’s data reliability tools. Soda is one of the 2021 Gartner® Cool Vendors™ in Data Management [1], recognition and validation for our approach to solving the number one data management challenge faced by modern organizations: ensuring high quality, trusted data is available to enable confident decision making, serve and delight customers, and improve processes. For more information, visit soda.io.
[1] Gartner “Cool Vendors in Data Management,” Philip Russom, Ehtisham Zaidi, Jason Medd, Eric Thoo, Robert Thanaraj, 1 June 2021 – ID G00746797
GARTNER and Cool Vendors are a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission[W1]