Natura Releases A New Sales Platform Using AWS Professional Services

In 2019, Natura launched its new Global Sales Platform (GSP) for the company’s beauty sales consultants. The GSP helped to embed Natura’s commercial ecosystem, composed of three other platforms—Registration, Management of the Business Model, and Relationship of the Direct Sale—and provided digital services to the consultants and sales force.

“With the GSP development and its incorporation to our commercial platform’s portfolio of products, we planned the first full stack deployment and chose Peru as the first country to host all of the integrated platforms. A highly competitive market that also had high capacity to perform tests with the new perspectives offered by the platforms,” explains Mario Santiago, director of commercial platforms at Natura &Co LATAM.

“GSP was created with a completely revised architecture and micro-services and became event-driven, which was extremely new at Natura as an answer to capturing orders from our sales consultants,” says Renzo Petri, head of cloud platform engineering and DevOps at Natura, highlighting the uniqueness of the platform in the company, which now largely uses AWS services for scalability and agile release potential.

The first deployment was a big challenge for several reasons: high functional range, integration between components from different platforms, deployment of non-functional components, operational aspects (monitoring, support, etc.), and security and reliability advances. “After our first full stack deployment, the Natura family expanded. The previously foreseen challenges became much larger with the foundation of Natura &Co LATAM, composed of Natura, Avon, The Body Shop, and Aesop in the region. It was precisely at that point that we realized it was worth having the support of a partner in the general optimization of the platform, focusing on the group’s growth expectations at this new chapter of our story,” tells Santiago.

“Aspects such as performance, scalability, resilience, cost reduction, and security were the main pillars of this task. We were seeking to advance in parallel in every relevant front of the platform, already paving the way to our future plans of expansion,” adds Santiago.

Petri recalls that AWS was a natural choice since both companies already worked together and AWS hosted the platform. The AWS Professional Services team performed the AWS Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR) of the GSP project. “We had clarity of what we wanted to achieve, but needed guidance, a broad analysis, and support for running several dimensions of the platform. And for this reason, we recognized AWS as the best partner for supporting us in this move,” recalls Petri.

At the end of 2019, Natura started focusing on the assessment and review of various infrastructure and architecture/engineering components of the platform. For that review, a collaborative team of 15 members were responsible for assessing each platform module over the course of 8 weeks. At the end of this period, a robust set of recommendations was generated and prioritized to ensure progress in the sales consultant experience and in accordance with the expansion plan to new geographical areas. “The joint effort of Natura &Co and AWS Professional Services teams was crucial for the group’s strategical context to be considered in the backlog prioritization process,” states Marcio Abdullatif, senior manager, GSP platform leader.

The AWS Professional Services team acted as an orchestrator in the meetings with the different technical teams involved in the work, aiming to identify and plan the potential moves to be made, as well as carrying out proofs of concept for the proposed solutions. “We achieved very strong engagement from all involved. Developer, architect, and infrastructure teams worked together for us to create positive impacts in our sales consultant experience,” highlights Abdullatif.

Today, GSP is in operation using services such as Amazon Aurora, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), AWS Lambda, Amazon Route 53, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (Amazon EKS), Amazon Cognito and AWS CloudTrail.

After implementing the proposed recommendations, Natura achieved significant gains in the user experience (UX) of the platform. “At Natura, we use APDEX (Application Performance Index) as one of the main indicators of experience by our sales consultants. With the transformations we made, it rose from 0.78 to 0.96. The performance improved significantly without functional loss and responded very well to higher volumes of use; the resilience has generally increased; the fault exposure has reduced; and, our monitoring became even more preventive. In parallel to all of that, we deployed consecutive functional evolutions, aiming to boost new features relevant to our consultants and sales force,” explains Marcio Abdullatif.

The project of reviewing Natura’s global sales platform was so successful that the company decided to use the AWS Professional Services team to run reviews of other critical platforms, such as the Global Commercial Platform 9GCP) and the Global People Platform (GPP), both of which help enable commercial services for consultants and the Natura sales force in Brazil, other Latin America countries, and Malaysia.