Oracle Magazine - November/December 2010

Alexandre Vasconcellos
CIO OF THE YEAR, LATIN AMERICA
CIO helms technological transformation to
support business growth.
2010

When Alexandre Vasconcellos, CIO of Brazil’s largest retailer and Oracle Magazine’s CIO of the Year for Latin America, initiated a massive project to convert the company from using customized, internally developed applications to an off-the-shelf Oracle Retail solution, he thought more about the company’s employees than the technology challenges.

“This was not an I T project,” says Vasconcellos, CIO of Grupo
Pão de Açúcar, a US$20-billion-a-year retailer of everything
from groceries to clothes to electronics. “It was a change in the
management model for the company, supported by a new system.”
Over the past 60 years, Grupo Pão de Açúcar has grown from
a small bakery to a major food and specialty retailer with more
than 1,300 stores across Brazil. It’s a sophisticated multicategory
business, with convenience stores, grocery stores, gas stations,
electronics stores, and even e-commerce operations. As the company
expanded rapidly into lines of business, management realized it
needed more-sophisticated software.

“We needed a packaged solution for retail that would cover a
multiformat, multicategory business and enable us to speed up our
infrastructure, systems, and business processes,” says Vasconcellos.
“After evaluating different options, our team decided Oracle Retail
was the best choice.”
The company committed to a three-year process of technological
transformation called “The Future of Retail,” which started in
November 2008 when Grupo Pão de Açúcar acquired an unlimited
licensing agreement for Oracle Retail applications.

“We took a change management approach that allowed us to
reduce the customization to less than 2 percent,” says Vasconcellos.
“We were very successful in having our users adopt Oracle concepts
while still achieving their business objectives.”
For Vasconcellos and Grupo Pão de Açúcar, shifting the focus
from technology to business processes and from customized internal
systems to Oracle Retail has already delivered benefits. The pilot
project completed with the group’s pet supply business showed an
opportunity to eliminate seven days’ worth of inventory. And so far,
sales figures are showing that reducing inventory hasn’t damaged
business. In fact, sales have increased. In addition, the new solution
has decreased out-of-stock occurrences by 50 percent. Completing
the rollout to all the company’s businesses will make it possible to
save an estimated US$300 million.

“Now that they see the results, everyone in the company is aligned with our targets because it means a lot of money,” says Vasconcellos, who says credit for the project’s success is due in part to his team sharing ownership of the change. “It’s a program that’s enabled our employees to transform themselves from passengers into pilots. We want our people to drive the change.”

WINNER S TATS

Name: Alexandre Vasconcellos
Job title: CIO
Company: Grupo Pão de Açúcar
Location: São Paulo, Brazil
Award: CIO of the Year, Latin
America, 2010