Grupo Bimbo Transforms the Data Analysis of Commercial Areas with Microsoft Solutions

Grupo Bimbo, the Mexico-based international producer of baked goods and snack foods is one of the world’s leading companies in food production. Born as a single Mexico-City-based bakery in 1945, Grupo Bimbo now has a presence in 33 countries, manufacturing and distributing nearly 10,000 products under more than 100 brands.   

At its core, the group is determined to be more efficient while providing high-quality products at a low cost to its end customers. As a result, at the beginning of 2019, they identified the need to promote digital transformation within commercial operations, realizing data was a key pillar in providing high-quality experiences for customers. It was clear that the current system wasn’t leveraging up-to-date data, and Grupo Bimbo needed a new solution.  

As a result, Grupo Bimbo worked with Microsoft to build a new system supported by Power BI and Azure Synapse Analytics. Grupo Bimbo was keen on driving a digital transformation in the collection and analysis of data in the commercial area and increased its level of productivity. With Power BI, Grupo Bimbo has seen significant improvements in productivity and operational efficiency. Now, analytics are quickly accessible, scalable, and help ignite data-driven decision making across the organization.

Developing the ‘Route to Market’ Analytics Solution

One of the primary uses of data analytics at Grupo Bimbo is to manage and understand the information collected along different sales routes. Known as “Route to Market”, the tool offers insights to various retailers to easily track sales and other relevant metrics. Route to Market also offers sales representatives at Grupo Bimbo the metrics they need to best support and work with retailers. Route to Market is an unlimited analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics allowing Grupo Bimbo to make sense of critical insights to drive the business forward.  

When Diego Bustos, Global Director of Data and Analytics, and his team, led by Sylvain Edelberg, Global Manager of Data and Analytics, set out to build the Route to Market solution, they realized Grupo Bimbo’s current backend could not support the ambitious data and analytics goals they had set for the project. Looking for an agile and robust infrastructure, the Data and Analytics team paired up with Microsoft to determine a new, scalable solution.  

Grupo Bimbo carries out hundreds of thousands of transactions a day globally. José Antonio Parra, Vice President of Digital Transformation, Information and Government at Grupo Bimbo, assures that "the capabilities that Azure Synapse Analytics has of being able to handle a large amount of data together with Power BI, and being able to visualize calculations and information that occur behind it are essential for collaborators to be able to make decisions at a global level”. 

Power BI Enables Critical Insights to Sales Data  

With the architecture in place, Edelberg and his team got to work building reports for Route to Market. Reports are used by the Global Commercial Sales Assistance team to understand key metrics on retailers and customers to better support them and enable their success.

Reports highlight 20 KPIs on retail workers. Users can access data on sales, returns, how clients are performing against budgets they have set and more. Clients and products can also be broken down into individual rows so Grupo Bimbo’s sales team can get a specific understanding of how certain retailers or products are performing, and where improvements can be made. According to Laura Martínez Espinosa, Digital Sales Global Director at Bimbo, having a clear and insightful dashboards also easily break down global customer trends to enable users to easily track progress and make data-driven decisions to best improve sales.

"Before, with the variety of systems we had, there were many different indicators and reports, so it was very difficult to compare the information," says Parra. "Thanks to the structure of Microsoft, today everything goes into a data model and is displayed in the same way in Power BI, no matter what country you are in," he adds. 

While Edelberg and his team continue to build the key reports for Route to Market, they are slowly beginning to enable self-service across the sales team. By providing access to a unified, reliable data set, users have the freedom to build reports for their specific needs.  

Adopting and Expanding Data Analytics Usage

While the adoption of Power BI is a journey not a sprint, usage has spread throughout the organization at a rapid rate. Grupo Bimbo encourages employees to utilize learning tools, such as Microsoft Learn, to improve the quality of reports and leverage Power BI for all possible use cases. Enthusiasm continues to spread throughout the organization, and active users continues to climb.  To ensure proper Power BI usage, those interested in Pro licenses must first pass a specific level of training.  The training gives users foundational best practices knowledge and instills confidence as they being to build and utilize reports.   

Since Grupo Bimbo adopted Power BI as part of Route to Market, they have noticed numerous benefits. By using Power BI, commercial processes were improved and automated, and the time for operational processes was reduced as productivity increased significantly.  

"Now, our agile environments allow us to transform and utilize data very quickly" says Herrera. Grupo Bimbo can now break down and re-align business rules at a micro level, allowing the company to grow at an increased pace. In addition, the new model allows them to make faster and smarter decisions and improves the quality of life for the sales force. 

Edelberg affirms that this initiative of digital transformation in the collection of information is not isolated; the data has already been used to develop a broader application and centralized source of data that broader groups can access. This project will lay the groundwork for future developments in Grupo Bimbo’s technology sector.  

Moving forward, Grupo Bimbo envisions a future powered by digitalization. The data and analytics team hopes to expand Route to Market by offering analytics for retailers to improve and manage their storefronts and improve sales on the other end. "Technology is an enabler for our organization, and a strong element to remain competitive," says Parra. “To offer the best service and product at the right price, we need to have all these end-to-end value chains operating intelligently, with the best data and AI capabilities added,” he concludes.