Supporting international growth of a LATAM retail company

Our client is one of the largest and most prestigious retail conglomerates in Latin America. To achieve SOX compliance and successfully enter the New York stock market, they needed to improve the way business-critical information was exchanged and monitored in the thousands of different applications they use.

They obtained full visibility, traceability, and control over their data flows in just 12 months by leveraging a Data Integration approach and Primeur’s technology. They implemented a scalable and secure solution currently used by more than 1,000 internal and external entities across 5 countries.

The Challenge

The customer had been facing an incredible growth, having acquired several companies abroad to expand their presence from Chile to Argentina, Peru, Colombia, and Brazil and willing to enter the NY Stock Exchange to further accelerate their development.

The long series of M&As had resulted in a highly complex IT landscape since every organization acquired was using different tools to manage daily activities. In this vast network with hundreds of points of sales, stores, deposit sites, and external suppliers, business-critical information about orders, pricelists, cashflows was exchanged through multiple applications, without understanding or tracing the data flows clearly.

The retail company had to demonstrate compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), a US regulation issued to protect shareholders from accounting errors and fraudulent practices. To achieve this, they needed to make their data exchange processes clear. To complete the listing process and be admitted into the stock market, they had to align to the high security and traceability standards required by the regulation.

Solution 

With hundreds of heterogeneous applications already in place, Data Integration was immediately recognized by the client as the best approach to overcome their challenges. The company adopted Primeur’s Data Integration platform as their corporate solution for file transfer and dataflow monitoring.

• A simple, scalable architecture for data exchange across countries and internal/external entities
• High security ensured when dealing with external counterparts
• A wave approach to deploy the model across geographies: 5 countries onboarded in less than a year
• A vertical integration tool to trace technical and business details of new integration requests

Results

Today, the client has 1,089 nodes in production (1,113 in total), 900 for internal applications and 189 for external counterparts (partners, providers, customers…). 

All business-critical data – such as orders, pricelists, cashflows – are now managed through Primeur’s platform in a secure and performing manner.

The company achieved SOX compliance thanks to the higher visibility and control on the information flow within the company, along with the improved traceability and accountability on the data integration process provided by the vertical integration tool.

The current solution is fully scalable: it allows the retail company to integrate new countries in as little as 30 days, successfully supporting them as they continue to grow.