Comercial Mexicana

Validated on 13 May 2013

"Loyalty programs can be a powerful source of information about customer preferences—but only if the data can be analyzed quickly and thoroughly to uncover hidden insights." - Flor Argumedo, CIO, Comercial Mexicana

Customer:
Comercial Mexicana

Industry:
Retail

Deployment country:
Mexico

Solution:
Business Intelligence, Data Warehouse, Smarter Computing, Smarter Planet

Smarter Planet:
Smarter Solutions for Retail

IBM Business Partner:
Appliance Technologies Mexico S.A. de C.V.

Headquartered in Mexico City, Comercial Mexicana, S.A. de C.V. (colloquially known as La Comercial or La Comer) is the third-largest supermarket chain in Mexico. It is part of the Controladora Comercial Mexicana Group, which also co-owns the local Costco franchise, Sumesa stores, City Market stores, Alprecio stores and Restaurants California. Its first store, which opened in Mexico City in 1930, primarily sold textile products. Today, the company runs several types of retail operations.

Business need:
Within six months of launching its loyalty program, this supermarket retailer in Mexico signed up three million customers and was capturing 14 million transactions per day. But what should have been a treasure trove of marketing intelligence was instead a fast-growing collection of useless data made practically inaccessible by an underperforming infrastructure. With data queries taking hours or days to complete, the retailer struggled to extract the insights it needed for procurement and marketing. It needed new levels of performance to support real-time analysis and reporting.

Solution:
Using a high-performance data warehouse platform for real-time analysis, the retailer can find out what makes customers tick: what they buy, why they buy it and what would make them buy more. This insight enables the marketing department to target individual customers with special promotions and services to encourage more spending. Gourmet or organic foods may be grouped together to entice upscale customers into buying more products with higher profit margins. The retailer can even track buying trends across times of day, days of the week and seasons, allowing for more accurate demand planning

Benefits:
· Improved query response times by as much as 99 percent, enabling a new approach to marketing with immediate insights for fast-turn targeted campaigns · Reduced costs by 50 percent by adopting an all-in-one appliance instead of purchasing hardware and database licenses separately · Gained the ability to upload 14 million records per day in just 30 minutes

IBM products and services that were used in this case study.

Software:
IBM Netezza 1000

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