MC: Scaling services across products, brands, and partners powered by Google Cloud
About MC
Part of Portugal’s Sonae Group, MC opened the first hypermarket in Portugal in 1985. It has now grown to become Portugal’s leading food retailer and has diversified into other areas, including health, well-being, pet supplies, homewares, and coffeehouses. MC operates more than 1,300 stores and has a large online presence.
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Contact usMC creates multiple customer-centric, value-added services that it scales across its brands, products, and partners with Apigee API Management.
RESULTS
- Over 3 billion API calls made per year
- Optimizes the time to market of new business partnerships
- Significantly improves processes through savings in integration costs and reduction in delivery lead-times
- Enhances security and governance through authentication, throttling, and other platform capabilities
700 API proxies exposed with Apigee API Management
In almost every country in the world there are a few companies that grow to become national icons, whose names are respected beyond their borders. In Portugal, that company is Sonae.
Sonae’s retail grocery division, MC, operates more than 1000 stores and has more than 3 million customers. Its operations cover restaurants, supermarkets, hypermarkets, homewares, health and wellness, and pet products and services. All of this is strengthened by a continuously growing online presence led by Continente and Wells online.
The Sonae group, the largest private employer in Portugal, aims to ensure that its employees feel part of the Sonae family wherever they are. As part of this, MC has been building IT capabilities that support its innovative, ambitious, and sustainable plans for the business now and in the future.
“We wanted a powerful, best-of-breed platform, with scalable infrastructure and a proven track record. And this was the case with Google Cloud Apigee API Management.”
—Bruno Mourão, Head of IT Transformation and IT Strategy & Experimentation and IT Director of Sonae’s retail division, MCChoosing technology for a diversified business
There’s much to consider when you’re selecting technology to enable different business models across multiple sectors, emphasizes Bruno Mourão, Head of IT Transformation and IT Strategy and Experimentation, and IT Director at MC. “Before deploying a new platform across the group, we need to make sure it fulfills several criteria,” he explains. “Its architecture must be future-proof so that we can tackle different challenges throughout time, without being dependent on major customizations or refactorings. A scalable architecture is also key so that it can be potentially rolled out across all operations. And, we also look at the total cost of investment. There must be a strong business case for investment in technology.”
With the introduction of new capabilities and the orchestration of the legacy architecture, the foundational capabilities that support interoperability became more critical for MC. “Orchestrating a modular architecture requires very strong and robust foundational capabilities,” says Mourão. “We want all our tech solutions to be more interoperable. And, since this can’t depend on peer-to-peer protocols, we need to proactively prepare the exposure of services to multiple consumers within and outside of the organization.”
When it came to developing and managing MC’s enterprise architecture, Google Cloud was a natural option. Mourão says: “Google Cloud offers a robust foundation to support enterprise architectures, now and in the future. We didn’t want a cutting-edge product where the quality wasn’t proven. We wanted a powerful, best-of-breed platform, with scalable infrastructure and a proven track record. And this was the case with Google Cloud Apigee API Management.
Managing and scaling multiple APIs enhances group efficiency
MC began using Apigee API management in 2017, a pivotal moment in the development of its IT infrastructure. Up until this point, most of its applications had been tailored specifically to a set of business processes. Mourão and the team were on a mission to change this. “It was important for us to be able to reuse a service across several touchpoints. To use the same product returns process, for example, for all our retail brands, physical stores, online websites and contact centers,” he explains. “Apigee API Management made that possible. It’s like our PBX for applicational services.”
Apigee API Management enables services to be seamlessly scaled across multiple applications and platforms to create a thriving ecosystem. It means that one service can be quickly plugged and orchestrated to meet different business needs and used by external partners.
When working on existing APIs in Apigee, perhaps to replicate them or use them for the basis of a new API, API proxies can be created that decouple the application-facing APIs from the backend services. A service created for its online ordering system, for example, can be exposed through different APIs so that it can be orchestrated by different brands. A change can be made to the backend of the service and all the brands and applications connected with that service are instantly updated. “It is common to have several brands using the same service, so this abstraction has brought agility and savings to our businesses,” says Mourão. “MC makes great use of Apigee and we have produced more than 700 API proxies over four years. Security-wise it’s also a plus with authentication and throttling managed by individual tokens that enable the management of throughput and latency.“
“It was important for us to be able to reuse a service across several touchpoints. To use the same product returns process, for example, for all our retail brands, physical stores, online websites and contact centers. Apigee API Management made that possible. It’s like our PBX for applicational services.”
—Bruno Mourão, Head of IT Transformation and IT Strategy & Experimentation and IT Director of Sonae’s retail division, MCLoyalty program functionality expands with Apigee
MC’s brand loyalty program was one of the first customer value propositions to leverage Apigee. Its 'Cartão Continente' is Portugal’s largest loyalty program, covering more than 4 million Portuguese households. Loyalty card services now expose balances and promotions, as well as several gamification dynamics. “The loyalty card architecture and its interfaces to internal and partner PoS, CRMs, websites, and other applications are now enabled through APIs managed by Apigee,” explains Mourão.
API Management makes external partnerships easier to develop and deploy. The loyalty program, for example, can be linked through APIs to partners, such as gas stations, banks, and fast-food restaurants. And, the onboarding lead time of new partners has significantly decreased due to the reuse of APIs.
API’s go from idea to execution within a week
“One of the challenges of developing APIs is the background research and design,” reveals Mourão. “Having patterns and guidelines that are induced through the platform, along with a very intuitive and swift deployment process, has significantly reduced the time to market of integrations.”
MC increasingly uses Apigee API Management to reuse APIs for different use cases. The speed with which it can do this was appreciated when COVID 19 hit and MC saw a huge growth in demand. “Demand surged and we had to scale our services and to onboard new partners as third-party delivery partners,” says Mourão. “To meet this demand we connected with several delivery services and marketplaces, such as UberEats, using Apigee API Management.”
“The plan is to expand our API coverage to address more business use cases. Google Cloud is a strategic partner that can scale exponentially, in a secure and informed way. It has been and continues to be a game-changer.”
—Bruno Mourão, Head of IT Transformation and IT Strategy & Experimentation and IT Director of Sonae’s retail division, MCHarnessing data to improve apps
Apigee helps the group collect valuable data. It found, for example, that over three billion API calls were made on a yearly basis for the loyalty program alone. The Apigee platform provides analytics, and to further consolidate its data collection, MC also leverages its subscription of Google Analytics 360 to generate further actionable insights from its data. Mourão says: “This data is very relevant for us, not only to better understand the customer experience cohort, but also to ensure service availability.”
Having achieved so much already, Mourão is looking forward to continuously unfolding the full potential of Google Cloud at MC. He concludes: “The plan is to expand our API coverage to address more business use cases. Google Cloud is a strategic partner that can scale exponentially, in a secure and informed way. It has been and continues to be a game-changer.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About MC
Part of Portugal’s Sonae Group, MC opened the first hypermarket in Portugal in 1985. It has now grown to become Portugal’s leading food retailer and has diversified into other areas, including health, well-being, pet supplies, homewares, and coffeehouses. MC operates more than 1,300 stores and has a large online presence.