Cencosud — one of the most important retail groups operating in Peru and a supermarket leader, part of a major Latin American retailer — faced steep technological barriers. The business had no single repository of information and relied on a tedious consolidation process, with the symptoms that follow:

• No single source of truth, and a tedious manual process to consolidate information
• Reports built by hand
• Static reports refreshed weekly or monthly — useless for daily decision-making
• Different numbers: each area carried its own figures for the same indicator, so everyone had their own version of the truth
• Growing dissatisfaction across the business areas

The business areas needed to respond with agility to the questions that kept arising, so they could make the right decisions at the right time — and they were explicit that static reports were no longer enough.

The Objective

The goal was to build an application capable of handling large volumes of data and making information available immediately — sliceable by business unit, service, product, geographic zone, commercial condition and more, so any area could analyze the business from whatever perspective the question demanded.

The Approach

AYNITECH delivered a Business Intelligence platform on MicroStrategy that gave Cencosud centralized, homogeneous monitoring of a shared set of KPIs on a simple exploitation environment. Business users could analyze the data held in the data warehouse in a highly visual way — presenting results in control dashboards and dynamic analyses with Visual Insight — and run ad-hoc queries against the information model themselves, with no technical knowledge required. Adoption was driven deliberately: AYNITECH engaged area management early and framed the platform as a productivity benefit for the whole company.

In Their Words

“We want to analyze information from multiple perspectives, not through static reports.” — Cencosud, business areas

“Information has incalculable value — it should genuinely be a company’s greatest asset.” — Cencosud

“A very proactive team: they don’t wait for you to come to them — they go to you.” — Cencosud, on AYNITECH

At a Glance

• A single source of truth replacing each area’s “own version of the truth”
• Self-service ad-hoc queries with no technical knowledge required
• Large-volume data sliceable by business unit, service, product, geography and commercial condition
• Visual Insight dynamic dashboards with drill-downs across every warehouse variable
• Six benefit pillars: speed, efficiency, quality, integration, evolution and dynamism