Real-time information
How Sonae Universo more than doubled its response capacity
About this success case:
The solution adopted by Sonae Universo, in partnership with Xpand IT, enabled scalability, traceability, and greater information control. With over 150 APIs implemented and real-time dashboards, Sonae Universo reduced response time to 0.3 seconds, quadrupling its processing capacity and improving efficiency in error and data management.
SCOPE OF THE SOLUTION
- Microsoft Azure
- Real-time processing
- KPI monitoring and error management
The challenge: faster data processing
Sonae Universo was looking for a Microsoft Partner experienced in Azure PaaS services, so the work with Sonae Universo started in tight collaboration with Microsoft.
Even though Xpand IT has been delivering a set of different initiatives to Sonae Universo over the years, the initial challenge had to do with Sonae Universo preferring to receive live data from MTSP (Mastercard Payment Transaction Services) and integrate with 3rd parties to manage credit in real time.
At the time, Sonae Universo was processing huge files with the customer and their account’s data by end of day. Additionally, they needed to report errors in bulk and restart the process for that customer. Sonae Universo was taking an enormous amount of time to process all this information which hurt the company’s productivity and agility when it came to processing data.
This first challenge was just the beginning of a fruitful partnership that today includes a series of other projects such as preparing Sonae’s infrastructure and architecture to better integrate services and be able to receive real-time information from various areas of their business. Sonae Universo now has over 150 different APIs supporting their business needs.
Additionally, Xpand IT’s team has also been helping Sonae to build different applications and bots to respond to the specific challenges that they need to tackle. This scalability and multidisciplinary team are possible due to our own specific work methodology which is called CX-as-a-Service, that allows companies to have a resident team that will include the skills needed to face the customer’s challenges when needed.
The solution: detailed, real-time information
Our collaboration methodology called CX-as-a-Service is what made possible Xpand IT’s team multidisciplinary and scalable approach when delivering different projects over the years.
This methodology’s goal is to change the mindset from turn-key projects to a continuous digital initiative by adding value through a multidisciplinary and multi-technology team (including different skills such as UX/UI, Dev, Azure Backend Development, Integration and others) that is wholly focused on the client’s needs.
For the initial challenge, Xpand IT implemented a back-office using Microsoft Azure Services so that Sonae Universo could check the KPIs and manage potential errors in the integration. With this back-office, Sonae Universo could access different dashboards that now make possible to view KPIs in real time and get notified of deviations. These notifications can be, for example, delays in integration on 3rd parties or errors in message payloads.
By altering the architectural approach and including new dashboards and operational back-offices, Sonae FS was able to leverage Azure cloud technology to process the same amount of information in considerably less time (and react to errors faster). Sonae FS is now capable of auditing the whole process and have access to more detailed information, when before the operations team spent a greater amount of time to identify the origin of specific errors.
Considering all initiatives Xpand IT is developing, Sonae Universo now has the capacity to answer 4 times more requests compared to the beginning of the project.
The benefits: improved responsiveness and real-time capability
Centralized real-time information
For stakeholders to consult.
Scalability, traceability and control of information
Are enabled by this solution.
Capacity to answer 4 times more requests
compared to the beginning of the project.
An average answer time of 0.3 seconds
while processing 5 million requests over 30 days.
More detailed information
that results in saving time while trying to identify specific errors.
Main technologies
About Sonae Universo
Is the financial services unit of the Sonae Group, a multinational with operations in retail, telecommunications, shopping centres and technology. It manages cards like Universo and Dá, services such as Continente Money Transfer, offers in-store credit, coordinates insurance campaigns through the broker MDS, and develops accessible financial solutions to enhance the customer experience.
Mission & values
- Enable access to financial services
- Build trust and customer proximity
- Innovate with simple, useful solutions
- Act with responsibility and transparency
Type of solution
- Multidisciplinary, scalable project team
- Real-time KPI dashboards
- Error and deviation alerts
- Azure cloud for higher efficiency
- Full audit and detailed info
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