abastece-aí boosts analytics and data-based decision-making capabilities migrating to the cloud
About abastece-aí
abastece-aí is a Grupo Ultra company with 36-plus million customers that delivers a relevant benefit ecosystem, including the Km de Vantagens program, a digital wallet with cashbacks and other financial products that increase the purchasing power and improve the lives of Brazilian car owners and the general public.
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Contact usThe company built its analytics platform in Google Cloud, consolidating data from various sources in the data lake and leveraging data management, analytics, and exploration features.
Google Cloud results
- Significantly increased performance and speed for analytical, strategic, and operational deliveries
- Automated dashboards that meet business areas’ analytics and management needs
- Microservice architecture using manageable apps with easy interaction
- Customer segmentation, modeling techniques, and machine learning
- Significant expansion of the Growth department
Processes 250+ TB of data every month using BigQuery
abastece-aí is a fintech that provides a wide array of products and benefits through its app. These features, linked to the Km de Vantagens customer loyalty program, aim to increase purchasing power and make life easier for Brazilian vehicle owners. The company belongs to Grupo Ultra, which is present in most of Brazil and seven other countries.
Customers can use the app to pay for gas at registered stations or get discounts with abastece-aí’s partners, earn points (dubbed "kilometers") for the Km de Vantagens program, and trade them for benefits, coupons, or cashbacks to use as they please.
The company has 220 employees throughout Brazil and a relevant base of around 36 million registered customers. However, it faced an obstacle to keep growing: the lack of a structured data environment to enable cross-referencing data from various sources and the subsequent analysis of longer historic periods. Delays in obtaining that data also hindered operations, and the company needed dashboards with automatic updates.
In this context, abastece-aí needed a space with greater customization potential and increased leveraging of the insights it generated. Therefore, it urgently required a service provider that was attuned to those needs.
Choosing Google Cloud was based on requirements such as a lower deployment cost, a shorter development time, improved scalability, a steeper learning curve for employees, and more tools to perform integrations.
"Those factors made a difference, as did Google Cloud’s history and what we knew about their vast array of offerings. In the end, we approved the choice, especially due to the cost-benefit ratio, which generated gains on several business fronts."
—Fábio Salles, Analytic Intelligence Coordinator, abastece-aíThe starting point for digital transformation
The process of migrating to the public cloud and deployment began in January 2021 and was completed in May of that year. Google Cloud’s team was on hand throughout, helping deploy the best strategies and achieve a seamless execution.
abastece-aí built its data analytics system in Google Cloud seeking to consolidate information in a data lake based on BigQuery. A data lake is an integrated, subject-oriented data environment, which varies over time and is used to support management decisions. Currently, the solution processes 250+ TB of data every month.
Cloud Data Fusion intervenes on the database ingestion flows of the app and Km de Vantagens (the company's customer loyalty program), and sends data to the marketing automation platform used by the team. Currently, the company uses two Data Fusion instances, one in the production environment and another in the development environment.
"As for Data Fusion, while we were creating the data pipeline and even before finishing the project, we developed complex integrations in less than a week. This is an example of progress, an assurance that the solution can favorably cover us in an emergency."
—Thiago Grolli, Data Engineer, abastece-aíThroughout the process, abastece-aí’s team completed a series of training sessions together with Google Cloud’s experts so the data team could learn to work with BigQuery, helping employees master the tool. The teams also worked together to adapt the products’ potential to the fintech’s needs.
"We performed adjustments along the way, mainly concerning Cloud Data Fusion’s usability. That expert cloud support became essential, even in the post-sales phase, to better understand other tools, such as Vertex AI," says Thiago Grolli, abastece-aí’s Data Engineer.
Vertex AI and its integration with the Python programming language make it easier to use machine learning in the platform. The tools’ accessibility and easy interconnection make it possible to test new products and accelerate operational processes, increasing the company’s productivity and enhancing user experience.
Results of using the solutions well
The robust infrastructure and agile data query processing significantly boosted the company’s performance in its strategic, analytic, and operational deliveries. The abundance of data handling and analytics resources, and the increased scenario visibility, were essential in the expansion of abastece-aí’s Growth department.
The company saw other major benefits thanks to automated dashboards, which provide specific views and analytics for each individual business area. The cross-referencing of transactional data from various sources increased the quality and speed of deliveries, as employees began taking more variables into consideration. This democratized data consumption inside the organization, as members now make more accurate decisions to have a real business impact.
Another highlight was the microservice architecture using manageable apps with easy interaction, which reduces the number of employees who must focus on managing the infrastructure.
"The environment itself drove a culture change. We are now oriented toward data-based decision-making. We can respond by making improvements and anticipate sensitive changes. The perspective brought by exploratory analytics and comparisons resulted in this mindset change."
—Erick Tambori, Head of Data Analytics, abastece-aíIn the future, after maturing its way of leveraging the platform’s resources, the team aims to use even more machine learning solutions with Vertex AI. The evolving use of that tool goes in tandem with the development of the structure as a whole, aiming to improve the availability for exploring data and putting models in production.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About abastece-aí
abastece-aí is a Grupo Ultra company with 36-plus million customers that delivers a relevant benefit ecosystem, including the Km de Vantagens program, a digital wallet with cashbacks and other financial products that increase the purchasing power and improve the lives of Brazilian car owners and the general public.