The company's complex IT landscape, made up of legacy architecture and disparate databases, made actionable intelligence hard to come by, especially for a typical end user.
For example, the retail arm ran on separate ERP systems, including SAP Retail, while manufacturing relied on a different system. This made integration difficult and also required employees across groups to rely on thousands of duplicated reports. The lack of consistent, reliable data hindered everyday operations.
Grupo Bafar sought a technology provider that could help unify its SAP, Salesforce, and other data sources. The goal was to unlock insights and drive a cultural shift to empower all employees to take a data-driven, AI-supported approach to their daily tasks. The search led Grupo Bafar to Google Cloud, Servinformación, and Eleven Solutions.
A refined approach to data governance and analytics
Google Cloud stood out due to several key technologies, as well as its approach to innovation and support. As Grupo Bafar did not just want off-the-shelf tech, but rather guidance on becoming an innovative, data-driven company, the company's leadership felt Google Cloud was the right fit.
Grupo Bafar focused on three key solutions from Google Cloud:
- Google Cloud Cortex Framework was the perfect solution to unify SAP, Salesforce, and other data sources. Cortex addressed the complexity of extracting and replicating SAP and Salesforce environments by creating a 'mirror' of all fields in the cloud, resulting in a faster and more manageable way to move transactional data from all ERPs onto a new data lake. Google Cloud partner Servinformación assisted with the implementation.
- BigQuery was selected as the foundation for a new, centralized data lake because of its usability, scalability, and native analytics tools. Grupo Bafar stood up its new data lake on BigQuery and connected the previously siloed data sources. The company also incorporated new philosophies surrounding data governance and management to make the most of its new data lake. This unlocked the potential to leverage the data in more efficient ways.
- Looker will replace a legacy BI solution to eliminate the company's previous reporting inefficiencies and accuracy challenges. Looker powers the visualization layer to give all employees fast access to accurate, digestible, and actionable insights.
Grupo Bafar enjoyed immediate benefits from this transformation, including a massive reduction in the time to manage reporting. The company has already credited this work with its continued position as second in market share in Mexico.
With an ideal technological foundation, the company proceeded to focus on transforming its corporate culture.
Cultivating 'capacities': Aligning minds and machines
Grupo Bafar combined its technology transformation with an investment in 'capacities' – the ability of their people and processes to adapt to continuous change and innovation.
The combination of education and change management initiatives in partnership with Google Cloud and agile methodologies help employees move faster and keep pace with technological innovation.
As the company's culture and technology modernized, Grupo Bafar turned to Vertex AI to create agents. First, Grupo Bafar created an AI agent to assist 300 retail employees in a daily task of reviewing complex dashboards to analyze daily sales volumes, profits, and SKU performance. The agent has eliminated roughly 900 hours of manual reporting analysis daily.
Google Cloud partner Eleven Solutions assisted with the implementation of the sales agent.
Agents are also helping the retail marketing team accelerate their efforts by consuming transactional information like Salesforce and POS data directly from the data lake and monitoring campaign performance through Looker. Grupo Bafar's marketing leadership has now set an objective to become a true digital marketing entity, signifying how the data-first culture is taking hold.
Looking ahead, Grupo Bafar intends to create a dedicated hub of AI and innovation to assist each business unit in tapping into process automation and agentic workflows to keep improving performance.
Grupo Bafar gains a competitive advantage by working with Google Cloud. It's all part of the company's ambitious growth strategy to become the top player in the Mexican food industry.
Grupo Bafar is a leading Mexican food industry company with extensive operations in manufacturing, retail, distribution, finance, and agro-industry.
Industries: Agriculture, Manufacturing, Retail
Location: Mexico
