How Falabella’s India GCC Drove the Group’s Digital Transformation
About the Client
Falabella is a leading physical and digital retail company in the Latin American region, with presence in 7 countries, across 2 continents. Falabella has a strong network of 500+ stores, multiple brands and marketplace across various channels including online, in-store and multi-brand retail, with more than 30 million clients in the region.
The Challenge
Falabella had 25 different websites for brands including Sodimac, Tottus, and Mallplaza, each in need of modernization. It had been running its ecommerce operations on Oracle ATG for over 12 years and couldn’t just move ATG into a public cloud such as Amazon Web Services, or Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform. Because of ATG’s monolithic architecture and concerns about extensibility, the Falabella technologists were hampered and Falabella desired to explore a more flexible, open architecture.
Our Solution
Falabella partnered with ANSR to establish a GCC in Bangalore in 2018, becoming the first retailer from Latin America to launch technology operations in India. Since then, Falabella’s India center has become an innovation hub, which consists of 400 developers focusing on niche technology and transformational efforts. The masterplan for the modernization, Project Catalyst, was a two-year project that transformed the company’s largest website, Falabella.com. The idea was not to just shift from ATG to the cloud or bring in the best class technology, but to build a custom-made solution using open source and a homegrown microservices architecture. The team devised a two-layer solution—a unique proposition of a centralized technology platform and a flexible business layer to cater to the various businesses of Falabella Group. With the transformation, the entire Falabella ecosystem is now hosted on Google Cloud.
Catalyst not only emerged as a powerful, scalable, cloud-native, multi-tenant digital commerce platform that serves as a strategic asset connecting the entire Falabella ecosystem, but also serve as a backbone for Point-of-Sale systems. The GCC is currently building a digital ecosystem that leverages data, technology and talent to create ‘Supermarket’ stores, e- commence, marketplace, logistic services, payments and financial services.
Impact
After the transformation of its largest site, Falabella.com, in November 2020, the company saw the expected benefits, including a 114% year-on-year growth in gross merchandising value, 60% improvement in load time on its Falabella and Sodimac platforms, 30% reduction in search errors, and search speed increasing by 300% (from 40,000 to 120,000 results/minute).
There were some unexpected benefits, too. The transformation enhanced the company’s ability to respond to the increased demand for online shopping as a result of the pandemic. Falabella could quickly scale up to meet the disruption, which might not have been possible with India GCC.