Centauro: Creating a Data Culture to Support the Business

Centauro, the largest sports goods retailer in Latin America, relies on technology to offer a better customer experience, regardless of the sales channel (physical store, e-commerce or application). With 211 stores spread across Brazil, more than 300 million products in its portfolio and a multi-channel sales and service structure, Centauro has the challenge of keeping all of this running smoothly to delight the customer. 

The Analytics area was created with the mission to support the entire company, delivering reliable information for the best decision making and creating a data culture across the company. The project started two years ago and today many business areas make decisions using the intelligence of information analysis. The first challenge was to build a data environment with governance and quality and also to be able to deliver value faster, to be more agile, using data. It was possible with MicroStrategy. 

From then on, the company started using agile methodologies and having dedicated people for each data analysis project for Centauro's business areas. Due to the security layer of the MicroStrategy platform, Centauro is able to guarantee the governance and reliability of the data so that they are evenly distributed throughout the company. Any indicator monitored by the company that needs to be changed, automatically, will be visible for all queries, ensuring that the changes are replicated for all official reports. This is essential to avoid something very common in companies, which is that each area has different numbers on the same indicator. Including the data analysis strategy helped Centauro to make important decisions early in the Covid-19 pandemic, specially because the company's biggest revenue comes from the physical store. At the same time, with the restrictions on access to stores, e-commerce had an unexpected growth. So, at that moment, more than ever, it was necessary to make quick and assertive decisions. It was no longer a question of planning the next month or year, but the next day. Also to support the dissemination and consolidation of an analytical culture, Centauro has invested in training. To this end, the company promotes exchanges, in which the Analytics team spends time within another area to fully understand the department's functioning and its pains and, in the same way, people from the business areas are also temporarily allocated to the Analytics area to learn a little more about how to do data analysis.