Falabella's tech-forward retail vision is transforming in-store experiences

Retailers are embracing technology to elevate in-store experiences and gain a competitive edge. Falabella, a prominent Latin American retail conglomerate, understood the significance of store modernization in maintaining market leadership. To accelerate growth and scale, Falabella collaborated with Thoughtworks, a global technology consultancy, to bring their tech-powered future to life.

Building the blueprint for success: Thoughtworks embarked on a comprehensive three-month discovery phase to comprehend Falabella's technology and business landscape. This laid the foundation for developing an eCommerce product blueprint, which evolved into Falabella's digital retail backbone. This transformative platform serves as the base for delivering new business capabilities and accelerating innovation.

Store modernization and digital checkout: Through collaboration with Thoughtworks, Falabella powered the store modernization initiative, enhancing the checkout experience with advanced technologies. Seamless integration of handheld devices, self-checkout, mobile point-of-sale (POS), and scan-and-go capabilities revolutionized the shopping journey. A custom POS solution unified and improved the experience across all stores.

Key achievements:

1. Technology transformation: Falabella's digital journey is characterized by a cloud-native, multi-tenant, API-driven and scalable platform, built on domain-driven design principles. Hosted on Google Cloud, this platform employs a headless microservices-driven architecture, leveraging Kubernetes and event-driven architecture

2. Platformization of business capabilities: Extending the Digital Retail Backbone (DRB) to support multiple channels, segments and countries empowered Falabella to leverage DRB's core capabilities while customizing behaviors to meet specific requirements

3. Flexibility and control: The hardware-agnostic solution provided the flexibility to cater to Falabella’s varying needs across different locations, ensuring seamless operations and support

4. Streamlined deployments and real-time alerting: Falabella minimized deployment risks and ensured uninterrupted store operations through streamlined deployments and canary releases. Real-time alerting mechanisms promptly addressed any operational issues

5. Reduced time to market: Modern architecture and state-of-the-art platform helped Falabella experience a significant reduction in time to market for new features

“The strategic business priority for Falabella is creating an ecosystem with offerings across retail, payments, loans, insurance and logistics. This benefits not only the customers but also the buyers and sellers who can leverage the marketplace,” - Ashish Grover, Group CIO, Falabella

Empowering in-store experiences: Faster self-checkout, integrated with Falabella's FPay digital wallet, offered loyalty rewards and discounts, driving higher adoption among store customers. Legacy self-checkout interventions were significantly reduced, improving operational efficiency and enhancing employee satisfaction. The mobile POS (mPOS) served as a queue buster, enabling staff to promptly resolve customer issues.

Omnichannel strategy: Falabella's platform allows for swift scaling and facilitates their omnichannel strategy. Instant availability of developed features across business units reduces total cost of ownership. The cloud-based disaster recovery strategy ensures high availability.

Falabella and Thoughtworks envision a future where the platform seamlessly powers all digital and physical experiences, enabling new revenue streams and unlocking untapped possibilities.