Grupo Soma streamlines data management for its brands with a unified pipeline in the cloud
About Grupo Soma
Grupo Soma creates and markets premium fashion products. Its brands launch collections and products and sell them online and in store. Grupo Soma operates as a platform, supporting the decision scale for raw material purchases and cost negotiations.
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About IPNET Growth Partner
IPNET Growth Partner is a Google partner in Latin America. The company drives growth for other businesses, providing agile products and training teams to help with its customers’ tech development.
By adopting a data architecture project in Google Cloud in partnership with IPNET Growth Partner, the group improved deliveries and gained versatility to manage its brands’ information.
Results
- Reduced operational costs
- Agile deliveries to meet market demands
- Product focus supported by managed services
Integration and improved brand data management
Grupo Soma creates and markets premium fashion products. Its portfolio includes brands such as Farm, Animale, Fábula, A.Brand, Foxton, Cris Barros, Off Premium, Maria Filó, NV, and, more recently, Hering. Offering an original, extensive range of garments for a wide variety of clientele, its brands create collections and products to sell online and in store.
The group operates as a platform, supporting the decision scale for raw material purchases and cost negotiations with providers, shopping malls, and partner platforms. One of Grupo Soma’s main differentiators is its deployed tech layer, which has enabled quick growth for digital channels and brought innovation to its customers’ purchase journey.
Thinking about using technology to solve business challenges, the company established an area called SomaLabs. Focused on innovation and development, SomaLabs’ team works across all the corporation’s brands to bring best market practices in a sustainable, scalable way.
With the aim of expanding and adopting an inorganic growth strategy, Grupo Soma has taken over the operations of several new brands in recent years, resulting in a diverse data environment. Consequently, SomaLabs faced the major technical challenge of establishing a data pipeline to make the group’s information less complex, thereby organizing and managing it in an integrated fashion with a more agile solution delivery.
Data from every brand in a single structure
Grupo Soma was using other cloud service providers when it realized the potential gains of migrating to Google Cloud, such as improved security, reliability, and cost benefits. The company hired IPNET Growth Partner to start the process.
Focusing on operations and reducing costs, the migration was performed in late 2020 with extensive support from both Google and IPNET’s teams.
“The process began by identifying best-practice requirements for cloud data architecture and then continued with Google Cloud details and specifications. Good usage of cloud resources has always been one of this project’s main features.”
—Luiz Tozzi, Head of Data Analytics, IPNETThroughout the journey, interactive Q&A and brainstorming sessions proved crucial for making decisions about the new architecture. The teams hosted an interactive meeting for each new suggestion, and the solution was gradually improved until the consensus deemed it was ready for deployment.
“Back then, we realized Google Cloud would be the best partner for our apps and services as it was increasingly driving the integration and progress we were aiming for. As time has gone by, we’re sure that this helped our disruptive growth. Our evolution during that period was exponential.”
—Vitor Hugo Dorneles, IT Manager, Grupo SomaFour data layers were created to solve the biggest challenge: unifying and adapting all the brands’ data into the cloud. This information funnel consumes elements originated at points of sale and during ecommerce and then refines them for use by SomaLabs’ professionals. This organization was made possible by BigQuery, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub, and other solutions.
“The use of BigQuery as a data warehouse segmented in data layers, separating raw data from summarized and processed information, was one of the main differentiators behind the project’s success,” says IPNET’s Head of Data Analytics.
Positive outcomes after migrating
The cloud’s potential provided a versatile data funnel, supporting every step of the transformation and making them clearer and better organized. Now the company has a structure ready to support the incorporation of new brands under a single data model. Currently, Grupo Soma’s entire architecture is unified in Google Cloud.
The use of managed services allowed the team to increase its focus on products, reduce operating expenses, and ensure a more agile delivery of an expanding number of quality services in the cloud, thus meeting the premium fashion market’s demands.
“We feel we can deliver much faster than before, as the infrastructure is no longer a bottleneck. When I’m asked to create a project with basic infrastructure for a deployment, it now takes me one or two hours. That’s the agility the cloud guarantees.”
—Vitor Hugo Dorneles, IT Manager, Grupo SomaThe team wants to keep investing in improvements to make deliveries increasingly consistent and reduce their failure rate. Having a partner for that purpose is essential, as the tools and assets found can help the group innovate. This is why IPNET stands firm in its commitment to support the planning and deployment of new solutions.
Grupo Soma aims to become even more robust with the cloud’s scalability. The goal is to achieve the lowest possible unavailability rate for operations. Besides improving existing activities, the next steps consist of evolving into a concise tech system encompassing all the organization’s sectors, such as logistics, retail, and CRM.
The company will also launch a live streaming service to support sales teams. This asset will run in the cloud using Cloud Run and Cloud Storage. “Web lives rescued sales during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a code system, saleswomen promoted products and could earn sales commissions for them later,” says Dorneles.
The livestreaming allocation project will also involve integrating Google Cloud and IPNET’s teams with SomaLabs’ team, comprising talented young people eager to put their knowledge into practice for this new mission that is about to start.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Grupo Soma
Grupo Soma creates and markets premium fashion products. Its brands launch collections and products and sell them online and in store. Grupo Soma operates as a platform, supporting the decision scale for raw material purchases and cost negotiations.
About IPNET Growth Partner
IPNET Growth Partner is a Google partner in Latin America. The company drives growth for other businesses, providing agile products and training teams to help with its customers’ tech development.