Business Case of the First SAP NetWeaver Implementation in Latin America.

1. SAP Customer Success Story
Retail – Fashion Merchandising/Department Stores
“The SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence
functions have launched a new business era
at Riachuelo.”
Jorge Vasconcelos, BI Manager, Lojas Riachuelo S.A.
AT A GLANCE
Company Implementation Highlight LOJAS RIACHUELO
• Name: Lojas Riachuelo S.A. First campaign run with new
• Location: São Paulo, Brazil software resulted in complete SAP® xApp™ Analytics Composite Application with
• Industry: Retail sellout of advertised products SAP NetWeaver® Visual Composer Makes Business
• Products and services: Fashion within 10 weeks. Intelligence Easy
• Revenue: US$800 million
• Employees: 13,000 Why SAP
• Web site: www.riachuelo.com.br • Tight integration with existing
SAP software Retail is one of the most fiercely competitive markets worldwide.
(in Portuguese only)
• Partner: SAP® Consulting • High quality of graphical user A retailer’s success largely depends on its ability to understand
interface
Challenges and Opportunities • Ease of use for corporate its customers and fine-tune product offerings and store profiles
• Aggregate and analyze data from executives to customer preferences. This calls for state-of-the-art business
multiple sources
• Effectively handle very large data Benefits intelligence (BI) technology equipped to handle large data
volumes • Convenient, flexible creation of
• Categorize customers, stores, enterprise-wide, comprehensive volumes and merge disparate sources of information into a single,
analytics applications
and products for segmentation
• Easy configuration of user
enterprise-wide data warehouse while enabling user-defined
• Improve campaign efficiency
interfaces and reports based on analyses and reports.
Objectives SAP NetWeaver BI
• Consolidate information from • Effective customer segmentation
several repositories into a single, • Ability to match customer with Taking Analytics to the Next Level
integrated business intelligence product and store categories to
platform focus on premium customers São Paulo–based Lojas Riachuelo S.A. is a leading Brazilian fashion
• Have access to comprehensive, • Data integration across retailer operating approximately 100 stores, a sizable logistics
reliable information for effective applications
campaign planning and • Fast ROI department, as well as a credit and loan business. For years, the
management company has been successfully running the SAP for Retail
• Establish a new line of premium Existing Environment
stores based on precise customer SAP for Retail solution portfolio, solution portfolio as well as SAP® data warehouse software to
knowledge in-house campaign management
• Improve strategic business software store information on 1.5 million products, 10 million customers,
planning through powerful analytics Third-Party Integration and 80 million annual transactions. Several repositories delivered
SAP Solutions and Services • Database: Microsoft SQL Server analytical information on the data they stored, but correlating
• SAP NetWeaver® Business • Hardware: IBM
Intelligence (SAP NetWeaver BI) • Operating system: Microsoft and consolidating this information across systems was difficult.
component Windows 2003
• SAP xApp™ Analytics composite
application with the SAP Riachuelo understood it needed to unlock the full potential of
NetWeaver Visual Composer tool its data assets in order to segment its customers for improved
• SAP NetWeaver Portal component
• SAP Consulting services campaigning, recognize interrelationships between products and
customer segments, and identify trends. Riachuelo’s BI manager,
Jorge Vasconcelos, developed a three-tiered methodology called
concentric harmonic cycles (CHC) as a blueprint for implement-
ing a new business intelligence strategy at Riachuelo.

2. The ultimate goal was to create a new line of premium stores for A New Business Era
the company’s most valuable customers. In search of appropriate “The SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence functions have
software, Vasconcelos discovered that SAP offered the full range launched a new business era at Riachuelo,” says Vasconcelos.
of functionality he was looking for, plus a leading-edge architec- “They allow us to easily build any data mart we want. Within
ture to integrate all sources of information and enable fast, com- the SAP NetWeaver architecture we can easily integrate diverse
prehensive reporting. data sources for analysis and handle very large data volumes –
currently 200 million database records. Our executives now have
“Through the robust enterprise service-oriented architecture much better data available for business decisions.”
deployed by the SAP NetWeaver platform,” Vasconcelos explains,
“we could establish an enterprise-wide business intelligence Riachuelo immediately put its SAP NetWeaver BI solution to
infrastructure across the transactional and analytical environ- work in a mailing campaign. “The campaign was to run for
ments, with the SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence compo- three months,” reports Vasconcelos. “But after only 6 weeks,
nent at the core. The SAP xApp Analytics composite application, the products advertised were sold out.” The overwhelming suc-
the SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer tool, and the SAP NetWeaver cess clearly showed the power of the SAP solution. “Our SAP
Portal component were precisely the user-friendly tools we need- tools have refined our campaign processes, helping us select
ed to develop custom analytics applications and user interfaces.” customers for specific campaigns along with the products to
promote. We don’t have any exact figures yet, but we have defi-
New Best Practices for Implementation nitely increased our campaign revenues since implementing
Riachuelo implemented its new infrastructure based on the SAP NetWeaver BI.”
SAP NetWeaver® Business Intelligence (SAP NetWeaver BI) com-
ponent within a time span of only three months. “Our project The enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA)
was delivered within budget within 80 business days as planned enables Riachuelo to integrate its processes through all functional
and remained on schedule throughout,” says Vasconcelos. “The layers and across applications, including its in-house campaign
CHC project management method was applied successfully and management software. “By supporting our complete process
is now generally considered a best-practice approach.” cycle, the enterprise SOA offers a way to distribute the collabora-
tive processes of the value chain within the IT infrastructure.
The retailer formed an internal BI team to supply its internal Its performance takes us far beyond traditional architectures.”
clients – the executive board and top managers – with analytical
reports. Jointly with SAP Consulting, the team defined processes “Our executives are excited about the array of possibilities to gen-
and business rules within the SAP NetWeaver BI software to satisfy erate operational and analytical reports,” Vasconcelos continues.
the information needs. The team also deployed the SAP xApp™ “We can group stores by revenue, explore opportunities among
Analytics composite application to build analytics applications premium clients through targeted campaigns, and identify the
for specific reporting requirements. With the user-friendly SAP stores they frequent. These will become our new premium
NetWeaver Visual Composer tool, the BI team can easily design stores. We can also design product lines for specific customer
or modify graphical user interfaces based on the SAP NetWeaver groups. We are anticipating a significantly higher campaign ROI
Portal component to display information aggregated from differ- through all this.”
ent sources in a variety of formats and dashboards.

3. On the Right Track
Riachuelo now plans to gradually expand the new SAP NetWeaver–
based environment across all other business applications. A tech-
nical upgrade is being discussed, as are additional SAP products
such as the SAP Supply Chain Management and SAP Merchandise
“We can group stores by revenue,
explore opportunities among premium
clients through targeted campaigns, and
identify the stores they frequent. These
will become our new premium stores.”
Jorge Vasconcelos, BI Manager, Lojas Riachuelo S.A.
and Assortment Planning applications. Vasconcelos knows he is
on the right track: “To me, the SAP NetWeaver platform repre-
sents the best enterprise SOA platform on the market. And I can
positively say that the best practices embedded in SAP software
have enabled Riachuelo to optimize its business processes and
successfully complete a very challenging IT project.”

4. www.sap.com/contactsap
50 xxx xxx (07/04)
© 2007 by SAP AG. All rights reserved. SAP, R/3, mySAP, mySAP.com, xApps, xApp, SAP NetWeaver, Duet, PartnerEdge, and other SAP
products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and
in several other countries all over the world. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies.
Data contained in this document serves informational purposes only. National product specifications may vary.
These materials are subject to change without notice. These materials are provided by SAP AG and its affiliated companies (“SAP Group”)
for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind, and SAP Group shall not be liable for errors or omissions with
respect to the materials. The only warranties for SAP Group products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty
statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty.