Novis conducts strategic assessment for analytics development in Parque Arauco

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The Novis’ consultancy for Parque Arauco included a survey to establish the baseline and the conception of a future vision, defining then a roadmap to guide subsequent projects. The first step is consolidating Parque Arauco’s systems on a cloud environment, where the migration of SAP to AWS is key.

Parque Arauco is a developer and operator of multiformat real assets, primarily for commercial use, oriented towards different socioeconomic sectors in Chile, Peru, and Colombia. It has more than 50 real estate properties, in four shopping center formats: regional, neighborhood, outlet malls, and strip centers. It has almost 4,000 tenants and about 500 collaborators.

A Chilean company with over three decades of history, its responsible expansion, innovation, and a permanent focus on the customer has enabled them to become one of the leading shopping center developers and managers in the Andean region.

In order to progress and firmly position itself in face of the transformations the industry and the environment are going through, Parque Arauco needed to define its corporate strategy for the business intelligence world, considering the current and future challenges by 2025, in the countries it operates.

The project

Rodrigo Cortés, Analytics Assistant Manager at Parque Arauco, explains: “We needed to move on to a more open architecture that complemented our SAP solutions efficiently and that allowed for a flexible and scalable growth, at a reasonable cost. We wanted to make progress in our analytical developments, and the first thing we needed was to have visibility over the full scope of what implementing our vision means, along with the economical and technical assessment of the objective.

The main challenge in information management is the variety of sources and types of data, for it is necessary to adjust to the specific case of each one of the three countries, including for example legal and tax policy aspects.”

Parque Arauco appointed Novis to conduct a strategic assessment for analytics development, with the purpose of defining in a collaborative manner the planning of the projects to be done, considering the following elements:

• Evaluation of the current situation: tools, processes, and people.
• Evaluation of data management skills and practices.
• Evaluation and recommendations in organizational structure, roles, and functions.
• Definition of a roadmap for BI projects, aligned with the business strategy and information requirements of the operational areas.
• Definition of a BI technological strategy, to determine which technologies are best suited to develop a project.
• Definition of a value-oriented prioritization and project execution methodology, encompassing all the relevant areas to ensure their success.

The working methodology included the introduction of a paradigm shift in the execution of waterfall projects, complementing it with an agile analytical software development model.

The project’s characteristics required the engagement of multidisciplinary teams and included a round of approximately 25 interviews with different stakeholders in the organization, in the three countries. After the interviews on the current situation, workshops about the objective scenario were carried out with the Parque Arauco team, to have a detailed understanding of the baseline and determine the short, medium, and long term targets, and at the same time to identify technologies, skills, and processes to be developed.

Rodrigo Cortés is satisfied with the outcome: “The definition or our baseline allowed us to identify our maturity level in BI and, accordingly, to define the vision and planning of subsequent projects, being the most important one the technological upgrade of ERP on the cloud.

The quality of Novis’ consultants allowed us to move forward throughout the project in an expeditious and flexible manner. In addition to the inherent assessment documents, we were also able to accomplish proof of concept tests, coordination with cloud providers, and internal training to accompany the adoption of agile methodologies.

A business case was then formulated based on this work and complemented with the technological evaluation results, enabling us to begin developing new skills in terms of people, processes, and technologies.

As a first step of the roadmap, we made the decision to migrate to the cloud and selected AWS. During this year we will continue to migrate infrastructure and develop solutions with agile methodologies in parallel, in the spirit of having a solid base that considers as pillars the cloud platform, data governance, and both classic BI reporting and advanced analytics.”

This project was conducted by the Digital Innovations and Analytics area overseen by Andrés Teixidó, which aims at helping SAP clients to enhance their business processes and data analysis using new technologies and cloud services. On the Analytics side, it offers strategical consulting services for the planning of analytical initiatives, Business Intelligence development, Data Lake and Data Warehouse deployments on public clouds, Advanced Analytics development (implementation of predictive and prescriptive models), and Managed Services for the administration, operational continuity, and continuous improvement of analytical platforms.

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Article by Gilda Valderrama, Novis Bulletin editor.