C&A is an international fashion brand with a global presence in 21 countries. Since 1999, C&A México has established 76 brick-and-mortar stores in 60 cities, as well as an online store and transacts on other online marketplace platforms. In early 2024, Grupo Alfar acquired C&A México, extending its existing manufacturing and retail network and supporting C&A México’s growth strategy. With more than 4,000 collaborators, C&A’s mission is to offer accessible fashion in a responsible manner to Mexican families.
Retail faces immense competition with thin margins. Customer loyalty is earned by those that build and demonstrate the most consumer trust. Customer expectations of traditional and online retailers demand secure shopping experiences, knowing personal and financial information are upheld and not compromised.
Trust accelerates opportunity
“In retail, information changes very quickly and we need to take immediate action to take advantage of all the opportunities. Timely and quality data is critical to improve and make decisions quickly. We need to guarantee the quality and integrity of the data, as well as the integrity of all people, processes, and integrations,” says René Angulo, Data Warehouse Architect of Business Intelligence at C&A México.
C&A México’s data-driven decisions include areas such as:
- Customer insights and customer care using account details, credit card information, and gift cards.
- Financial performance at individual store and company levels, managing stock and costing, and supplier import costs.
- Store-specific and corporate level sales forecasting.
- Merchandising and purchasing based on demand, seasonality, and store-specific promotions.
- Distribution centers and inventory management.
C&A México’s use of data supports many lines of businesses by driving insights for business leaders to act. Seamless integration and harmonization of data across an organization is foundational to creating trusted data.
“We integrate all the data generated by the company’s daily operations and create data models to offer new strategic insights with the intent to recommend the best decisions for the enterprise to take,” Angulo shares.
Reliable, accurate, and governed data requires a modern data stack comprised of cloud analytics, data platforms, and data security solutions which secures data at rest and in transit. For C&A México’s customers, this means that their personal and financial data is secure.
“There are many source systems that generate data that we integrate into Teradata VantageCloud on Azure. From physical and digital Points-of-Sale (PoS) to distribution center operations, as well as internal company operations. By consolidating all the information into Teradata, we can provide insights in near real-time to make store-level decisions.” Angulo continues, “We also rely on data and integrate with third parties like suppliers and other eCommerce platforms. Therefore, security of data is a top priority for us.”
C&A México’s business users need access to the richest data possible to achieve the most robust analytical outcomes, all while protecting personally identifiable information (PII).
A simple and cost-effective way to circumvent risk while allowing access to rich datasets
C&A México protects and anonymizes customer PII and financial information but does not lose any of the data functionality typically lost when anonymizing data using legacy data protection solutions.
Teradata cloud security partner, Anonomatic, provides an integrated data security and privacy solution, PII Vault®. The tool includes Privacy ETL, a built-in component which allows C&A México to perform all their privacy and security data transformation as the data moves into or out of Teradata. Another module, Anonomatic Test Data Automation, enables populating non-production systems with fully masked production data.
“We use Anonomatic PII Vault to encrypt and decrypt large amounts of data feeding our VantageCloud analytics and data platform,” highlights Angulo.
“The integration between Teradata and Anonomatic allows us to then store the encrypted information in Teradata and use PII Vault to encrypt and decrypt data, allowing users and Tableau dashboards access to only the necessary information needed, such as the last 4 digits of a credit card while encrypting the full 16-digits.”
Anonomatic patented Poly-Anonymization® delivers far more value than legacy anonymization. Using Poly-Anonymized data allows C&A México to:
- Anonymize or mask identified data with a single API.
- Share/receive individual-level data without risk of loss or exposure of PII.
- Link multiple anonymous datasets, at the individual level, without exposing PII.
- Redact PII from unstructured data.
- Populate non-production environments with real data but not real PII.
- Exponentially expand those with access to the data.
- Obtain the same value from the data as if it were fully identified but without the risk of exposing PII.
Before the Teradata-Anonomatic integration, processing sensitive data took hours. Now, it takes minutes. Which means business users and executives can use the data more quickly to make strategic decisions.
“We see savings in terms of processing time and resource costs, which allows us to increase the amount of sensitive and encrypted data being loaded into VantageCloud using Anonomatic. Without the Teradata-Anonomatic integration, our most important processes would not be able to run in time to open stores every morning, ” says Angulo.
Together, the solution makes data more secure, accessible, and usable in a trusted manner that maintains regulatory compliance, reduces risk, and protects sensitive data.
Teradata VantageCloud on Azure delivers trusted and harmonized data for all
Teradata VantageCloud is the complete cloud analytics and data platform to unlock data and empower everyone across the organization. Harmonized data in a secure and scalable environment provides access to critical data for C&A México’s lines of business to discover insights and make decisions faster.
C&A México’s journey to the cloud roots back to C&A’s global presence. C&A is a global brand where each country operates independently.
“Our cloud journey began when our on-premises data warehouse was being managed by C&A Brazil. Data was exported from Brazil to México and then we would process the information for analytics and dashboards. This was a time-intensive effort that, in some cases, took days,” describes Angulo.
“Since each country’s C&A is independent, we decided to modernize with VantageCloud to realize compute and storage benefits and allow us to be more agile in our processes.”
VantageCloud on Azure provides greater data accessibility in a centralized, trusted cloud analytics and data platform. As a result, C&A México is better prepared to respond to each day’s new challenges.
“Having data more accessible and centralized in our VantageCloud on Azure environment, we now have all the necessary information and are able to prepare stores overnight and intraday,” says Angulo.
Business users now have trusted, reliable, and secure data with insights available to them as quickly as possible. Together, VantageCloud and Anonomatic position C&A México to lead the future by delivering trusted data in preparation for AI/ML opportunities.
“We need an analytics and data ecosystem that allows us to handle large volumes of information efficiently and with high performance and security. The integration between Teradata VantageCloud on Azure and Anonomatic allows us to do that,” concludes Angulo.
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