Grupo Casas Bahia increases data processing power and becomes the first Microsoft Fabric success story in Latin America

Grupo Casas Bahia, with more than six decades of history in Brazilian retail (formed by the brands Casas Bahia, Ponto, Bartira, Extra.com, banQi, Rede Celer, ASAPLog, and CNT), aspires to consolidate itself as an omnichannel platform for relationship and consumption management with the customer as a central element of its entire ecosystem. To do this, they offer the consumer the possibility of using their services and products whenever, wherever, and however they wish.

An imminent challenge

Facing a landscape of constantly increasing demand, Grupo Casas Bahia manages a vast array of more than 3,000 reports, distributed through 208 Power BI Premium workspaces. With a base of over 12,000 active users, the team needed immediate access to valuable insights during the most important time of the year, 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 the Brazilian retail trade—surpassing traditional holidays, such as Christmas and Mother's Day), Grupo Casas Bahia needed a solution capable of eliminating bottlenecks impeding speed and scale in its data analysis environment—an essential element for the group's strategy, in which reports are generated both for its sales team and to fight against fraud. Regarding this scenario, Denisson Ferreira da Silva, Data Analyst at Grupo Casas Bahia, who works directly on the front line, recalls: "We were coming from a period of putting out fires."

An unexpected solution

To deal with the challenges that the company had been facing on a daily basis due to its large volume of data (which usually peaks during the promotional period), Fabiola Campos de Carvalho Rocha, Business Intelligence Coordinator at Grupo Casas Bahia, says that she asked Microsoft about a month before Black Friday for an increase in the base capacity of Microsoft Power BI Premium. However, the resolution would not come as imagined: "At the last minute, we understood that we were not going to get this extra capacity, and our alternative was to expand processing capacity via Microsoft Fabric."

As this was a new solution on the market, the team was concerned about the potential of the tool and its ability to meet the needs of the conglomerate during the main sales date.

From apprehension to the first Microsoft Fabric success story in Latin America

The team's challenge was to use, in a short period of time, a tool they were not familiar with. Fabiola says, “The challenge was huge at the company’s most critical moment, which was Black Friday. Fear existed, but it did not paralyze us. We were going do it and be successful!”

Still, in the first months of the year, under the management of Renato Tironi da Silva (Executive Manager of Data Engineering), the first assessment of the environment was carried out for a better understanding of the gaps and points of opportunity for better consumption. With those points determined, a task force was created to carry out the mapping and implementation of the “quick wins” for an evolution of the current environment. In this first phase, a better distribution of workspaces, a cleaning of critical dashboards, and a better deployment structure were implemented. With the mapping and first optimizations completed, the team implemented a center of excellence (CoE) with the best practices of the environment for the business areas. After this action, close to Black Friday, the second stage of the process began with support from a Microsoft data engineer.

With this engineering support, the action plan was defined to secure the largest national retail event. An environment for reporting was created in Microsoft Fabric, and in parallel, autoscaling in Power BI Premium was triggered for existing environments, redistributing the workspaces between Microsoft Fabric and Power BI Premium to increase resilience and processing capacity, minimizing the risk and impact of potential incidents.

The intuitive features of Microsoft Fabric in the hands of a quality team

Bruno Vinícius dos Santos, BI and Analytics Manager at Grupo Casas Bahia, talks about the reception of Microsoft Fabric by the IT team: "We were very happy about how easy the tool was to adopt. 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 suite and the support we had.”

In fact, this implementation took place in an agile way. On the Friday before the start of the critical Black Friday period, they began the process. On Saturday, Microsoft Fabric environments were created and autoscaling in Power BI Premium was activated. On Sunday, the workspaces were distributed and ready for the start of promotions on Monday.

Robson Soares de Oliveira, Business Analytics Coordinator at Grupo Casas Bahia, talks about one of the challenges: “We talked to the people at Microsoft before implementation, and they told us that it would be very simple and intuitive. At the last minute, we needed to redistribute the loads. We activated the environment in Microsoft Fabric and created an environment there. We were apprehensive—it won't be as simple as we've been told, we thought. But just like that, literally, we went upstairs, set up, and by Monday morning, everything was fine!”

User satisfaction and zero incidents with Microsoft Fabric

The project proved successful and exceeded the expectations of all the teams involved—from the IT team to the physical store managers and group’s executives. It was successful from the perspective of environment stability and in the generation of reports and use of data—on the sales and fraud-prevention front—which brought a huge gain by eliminating potential financial losses.

Robson talks about the outcome of the project: “I think that not only was it good; it was even better. There were zero incidents—given the last-minute setup, that is an absolute success. We heard a lot of praise from the business areas about the stability of the environment.”

Glaucia Tatiana Ferrari, Executive Manager of Advanced Analytics at Grupo Casas Bahia, agrees: “Our success metric was to absorb the growth in Black Friday demand in a way that would go unnoticed by the areas, because this would indicate to us that, in fact, the work was very well done. And that's what happened. We just didn't go totally unnoticed because the work was very well done, and we received excellent feedback.”

Doing more with less

After the successful experience with Microsoft Fabric, the group's IT team is focused on optimizing operations to generate savings. Bruno concludes: “We want to spend less and perform better.”

Fabio Dias, Customer Success Account Manager at Microsoft, talks about the customer’s competence: “Grupo Casas Bahia has a very tough team that makes it happen. They were able, in a short time, to add Microsoft Fabric to the existing Microsoft Power BI Premium environments to meet Black Friday, creating a successful model.”