Saves sales executives three hours daily on reporting through AI agents
Enhanced data consistency and reporting accuracy with a unified data lake on BigQuery
Continues to hold second place in the Mexican food industry market share
Unified previously disparate ERP, transaction, and other data sources through the Cortex Framework
Inspired widespread corporate culture change for more modern performance using AI
Grupo Bafar uses the Cortex Framework to unify disparate data from SAP, Salesforce, and other sources on a BigQuery-based data lake.
Grupo Bafar uses the Cortex Framework to unify disparate data from SAP, Salesforce, and other sources on a BigQuery-based data lake.
Overcoming extreme data silo challenges
We were hamstrung by the sheer magnitude of siloing across the business. BigQuery and Cortex Framework represented the simplest and most progressive path forward.
Elias Picos Vega
Director of Digital Strategy, Grupo Bafar
What happens when a major multinational grow-to-sell food industry player wants to unlock the power of data-driven insights and AI? The answer lies with Grupo Bafar, a company with operations spanning agriculture, manufacturing, retail, finance, and beyond.
The company's leadership had a singular vision to evolve from a traditional food business into a 'food tech company' – not by selling software, but by leveraging the best technology to inject efficiency and intelligence into day-to-day processes across its business units.
To achieve this goal, Grupo Bafar needed to get past a common and persistent challenge: heavily siloed data.
The company's complex IT landscape, made up of legacy architecture and disparate databases, made actionable intelligence hard to come by, especially for a typical end user.
For example, the retail arm ran on separate ERP systems, including SAP Retail, while manufacturing relied on a different system. This made integration difficult and also required employees across groups to rely on thousands of duplicated reports. The lack of consistent, reliable data hindered everyday operations.
Grupo Bafar sought a technology provider that could help unify its SAP, Salesforce, and other data sources. The goal was to unlock insights and drive a cultural shift to empower all employees to take a data-driven, AI-supported approach to their daily tasks. The search led Grupo Bafar to Google Cloud, Servinformación, and Eleven Solutions.
A refined approach to data governance and analytics
Our ultimate goal is to be prepared for new opportunities presented by technological innovation. Google Cloud's support and guidance propelled us to achieving this objective very quickly.
Elias Picos Vega
Director of Digital Strategy, Grupo Bafar
Google Cloud stood out due to several key technologies, as well as its approach to innovation and support. As Grupo Bafar did not just want off-the-shelf tech, but rather guidance on becoming an innovative, data-driven company, the company's leadership felt Google Cloud was the right fit.
Grupo Bafar focused on three key solutions from Google Cloud:
- Google Cloud Cortex Framework was the perfect solution to unify SAP, Salesforce, and other data sources. Cortex addressed the complexity of extracting and replicating SAP and Salesforce environments by creating a 'mirror' of all fields in the cloud, resulting in a faster and more manageable way to move transactional data from all ERPs onto a new data lake. Google Cloud partner Servinformación assisted with the implementation.
- BigQuery was selected as the foundation for a new, centralized data lake because of its usability, scalability, and native analytics tools. Grupo Bafar stood up its new data lake on BigQuery and connected the previously siloed data sources. The company also incorporated new philosophies surrounding data governance and management to make the most of its new data lake. This unlocked the potential to leverage the data in more efficient ways.
- Looker will replace a legacy BI solution to eliminate the company's previous reporting inefficiencies and accuracy challenges. Looker powers the visualization layer to give all employees fast access to accurate, digestible, and actionable insights.
Grupo Bafar enjoyed immediate benefits from this transformation, including a massive reduction in the time to manage reporting. The company has already credited this work with its continued position as second in market share in Mexico.
With an ideal technological foundation, the company proceeded to focus on transforming its corporate culture.
Cultivating 'capacities': Aligning minds and machines
With the help of Google Cloud and its partner ecosystem, Grupo Bafar is poised to accelerate innovation and achieve a more creative organizational mindset that handles change management with ease and onboards new capabilities at speed.
Elias Picos Vega
Director of Digital Strategy, Grupo Bafar
Grupo Bafar combined its technology transformation with an investment in 'capacities' – the ability of their people and processes to adapt to continuous change and innovation.
The combination of education and change management initiatives in partnership with Google Cloud and agile methodologies help employees move faster and keep pace with technological innovation.
As the company's culture and technology modernized, Grupo Bafar turned to Vertex AI to create agents. First, Grupo Bafar created an AI agent to assist 300 retail employees in a daily task of reviewing complex dashboards to analyze daily sales volumes, profits, and SKU performance. The agent has eliminated roughly 900 hours of manual reporting analysis daily.
Google Cloud partner Eleven Solutions assisted with the implementation of the sales agent.
Agents are also helping the retail marketing team accelerate their efforts by consuming transactional information like Salesforce and POS data directly from the data lake and monitoring campaign performance through Looker. Grupo Bafar's marketing leadership has now set an objective to become a true digital marketing entity, signifying how the data-first culture is taking hold.
Looking ahead, Grupo Bafar intends to create a dedicated hub of AI and innovation to assist each business unit in tapping into process automation and agentic workflows to keep improving performance.
Grupo Bafar gains a competitive advantage by working with Google Cloud. It's all part of the company's ambitious growth strategy to become the top player in the Mexican food industry.
Grupo Bafar is a leading Mexican food industry company with extensive operations in manufacturing, retail, distribution, finance, and agro-industry.
Industries: Agriculture, Manufacturing, Retail
Location: Mexico
Products: BigQuery, Cortex Framework, Vertex AI, Looker
About Google Cloud partner - Eleven Solutions
Eleven Solutions is a company that focuses on innovation and technological services. Its focus is on collaborating and accompanying its clients in understanding the importance of digital transformation and process automation.
About Google Cloud partner - SAP
SAP is a leading enterprise application and business AI company. It stands at the intersection of business and technology, where its innovations are designed to directly address real business challenges and produce real-world impacts.
About Google Cloud partner - Servinformación
Servinformación is a company born from the effort and dedication of a group of professionals specializing in various areas of consulting and in the collection of information and implementation of Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
