Tenda creates new products with Google Cloud to become a digital construction company
About Construtora Tenda
Tenda is one of Brazil’s largest construction companies. Focusing on affordable housing, the company’s mission is to make its customers’ dream of owning a house come true.
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About Tigabytes Somos Nuvem
Tigabytes Somos Nuvem is one of the largest Google Cloud Premier Partners in Latin America. It started operating in 2006 in Chile, arriving in Brazil in 2014. Today there are more than 2,000 Google Cloud Platform projects and more than 500,000 people with Google Workspace implemented.
Seeking to innovate in an analog market, Construtora Tenda began putting together a portfolio of solutions based on Google Cloud to cater to increasingly digitized consumers.
Results
- The company’s sales volume in Portal das EVs rose to over 50% from 15%
- 50% of customer calls go through Plataforma TcV, thus reducing the number of phone calls
- Customers are guaranteed 24/7 access to financial and contractual information
- Stable systems with zero unavailability
Integrating systems has saved R$ 1 million per year.
Focusing on affordable housing, Tenda is one of Brazil’s largest construction companies, with around 4,000 employees and offices in nine states. With over 50 years’ experience in a predominantly analog industry, the company’s IT team was inspired by digital transformation stories from other market segments to take on a great challenge: transforming Tenda into a digital construction company.
This challenge led the company to review its own notions about consumers. “We used to believe our customers were analog rather than digital, in a segment where technology was not integrated into daily routine,” says Igor Gomes, the company’s CIO. After interviewing customers and examining their working day, the team realized they were becoming increasingly digital and found several friction points generated by the analog routine that could be reduced or eliminated to improve customer experience and increase sales.
From then on, digitizing processes and creating digital tools and channels became a priority for the company. The team was split into squads and started developing a technology master plan to improve the architecture. But they still had a hurdle to clear—Tenda’s data center’s capability had already reached its limit. They would need a new data center to create new products, which could cost a few million reais. The solution was found in the cloud.
Testing, learning, and performing
Tenda’s team already had a digital product to develop: a sales app. However, they experienced usability and cost issues with the cloud provider they had chosen for early testing. The next test was run with Google Cloud tools introduced to them by partner Tigabytes Somos Nuvem. “As soon as we migrated, we began noticing all the benefits. The learning curve was steep,” says Rodrigo Barbosa, Tenda’s Head of Agile Transformation.
Tigabytes Somos Nuvem’s consultants supported the company throughout the process of preparing, adapting, and adopting Google Cloud’s solutions. Easy management and cost control were two major differentiators for the team. Not only can the environment be split into projects and sent to each squad, but the costs for each project can also be explained and understood in the company’s budget meetings more transparently.
“We no longer need to worry about having space in the data center. We were able to align our entire security with our network and gained scalability. From then on, we began thinking about new solutions within the squads directly in Google Cloud.”
—Rodrigo Barbosa, Head of Agile Transformation, Construtora TendaSeveral tests were run to analyze the operation and performance of each of the solutions so that Tenda could pick the ones that best suit its products. “It was a lab-test process that gradually expanded until we embraced cloud products. Now it’s a growth process. The team working with Google Cloud is the smallest and performs extremely well because it understood the tools’ features,” says Katharine Beirigo, the company’s IT Architecture Coordinator.
Today, Google Cloud is the foundation for every system in Tenda’s innovation department. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) surprised the team with its performance, processing power, flexibility, and the possibilities it opens for the development of new products using the microservices concept. Another highlight was the management of virtual machines (VMs) through Compute Engine, since it makes it easier to provision, monitor, and improve system infrastructure.
“We can gain a very quick overview of the platform’s environments. Google Cloud’s console provides us with very dependable support, since we promptly receive all the information we need to solve problems on the screen.”
—Katharine Beirigo, IT Architecture Coordinator, Construtora TendaProducts for a digital construction company
The sales app launch was followed by other cloud-native solutions in 2020. Portal das EVs is a channel enabling partner companies to sell Tenda’s products. In the beginning, it accounted for 15% of the company’s sales volume, whereas now it represents more than 50%.
The TcV (Tenda com Você) platform is an app and website suite built to support customer service, increase speed, and provide 24/7 access to financial and contractual information. As this platform currently handles 50% of customer calls, the number of phone calls has reduced from 72% to around 38% of all calls handled by customer service.
There is also Zeus, a service bus built by Tenda’s team based on a microservice architecture in GKE. Google Cloud helps ensure the stability and zero unavailability of the tool, which is responsible for all integrations between the company’s existing and new systems, and has led to savings of approximately 1 million reais per year. By preventing departments from stopping their work due to integration issues, the solution has also increased productivity and reduced employee overtime.
Growing without fear
Besides adopting the cloud-first premise for every project, the construction company’s IT team became more flexible and efficient in running performance tests. “It is very reassuring for us to know that a system was tested in a very similar environment to the one we would have in production, something that would be virtually impossible to do on-premises,” the CIO explains. “Even in the event of an error, we have a very quick change speed in the production environment. On-premises, we would need to buy machines and work on the setup as quickly as possible. From a hardware standpoint, we were stuck.”
Another major change was a greater alignment between the business and technology departments. For example, they used to struggle to maintain full system availability in times of peak demand, such as during apartment fairs. Even when they prepared the infrastructure beforehand, they experienced bottlenecks that stopped or significantly slowed down many of their systems. Using the cloud streamlined the scheduling of specific campaigns and allowed them to grow as needed.
“Just as our business is booming, we can change the technology infrastructure to support that almost instantly."
—Igor Gomes, CIO, Construtora TendaThe technology team can now think of quick solutions to handle any kind of business demand, while the business department began regarding IT as a great partner to work alongside.
In 2021, the company aims to hone a customer service tool with the potential to bring even better results. This tool can already be used to customize lead flows for uniform distribution among sales representatives. In future, more strategic distribution should be possible by combining customer attributes with each representative’s sales history. To this end, Tenda will continue to rely on the support provided by Tigabytes Somos Nuvem and Google Cloud’s AI solutions.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Construtora Tenda
Tenda is one of Brazil’s largest construction companies. Focusing on affordable housing, the company’s mission is to make its customers’ dream of owning a house come true.
About Tigabytes Somos Nuvem
Tigabytes Somos Nuvem is one of the largest Google Cloud Premier Partners in Latin America. It started operating in 2006 in Chile, arriving in Brazil in 2014. Today there are more than 2,000 Google Cloud Platform projects and more than 500,000 people with Google Workspace implemented.