The story of Julio Corrales. Digital Creator at Grupo Falabella

During the pandemic, we started a program called “Digital Immersion” to develop Grupo Falabella's digital talent. The company wanted to promote in all its workers the ability to use no-code tools to do their work in a more creative and efficient way (what in Kaudal we call Digital Adaptability).

The first goal of this program was to encourage employees from administrative and store areas to learn and use no-code tools to solve problems in their area of work and create digital solutions. In this article, I want to tell you about the case of Julio Corrales and how his solution brought great savings to his work and the company.

The proeblem: Thefts that take time to be reported. Security not raised on time.

Julio works in the Risk Prevention and Customer Service Area at the Falabella Peru offices. He and his team were looking to reduce the problem of shoplifting. When a product is stolen from a store, the traditional procedure is to report it in a system that is uploaded to a central database once a week, and that very few people review. This prevents other stores from raising security for shoplifting that has occurred at another store.

Solution with No-code: App to report and make thefts visible instantly.

This is how they discused the need to have a tool that allows more expeditious reporting of thefts and timely decision-making. To do this, they decided to create an application to, on the one hand, report the stolen object, and, on the other contact the Prevention Managers of the other stores, in real time, with an alert so that they increase the security or inspection of that element.

At first, it was difficult for the team, as they needed to identify a digital tool that would allow them to upload huge databases with all the store products. When testing with the first tool "Google Sheets", they realized that there were many limitations. It didn't give the results of the formulas that they were expecting, it was overloaded trying to search for a hyperlink and it didn't achieve the final result. They were very frustrated at first, but then heard in one of the program's remote sessions from another team about their experience using another tool, which could be their solution.

That's how they discovered Glide, a tool to create apps from a very easy-to-use spreadsheet. The app he created allows store staff to instantly report shoplifting and workers from other stores can get hold of the information instantly as well, to heighten security. With Glide, they were able to create the product by diferentes area and store categories they needed. At first, like many times, they believed they couldn't make it, because they couldn't upload information due to security issues and the store leaders did not approve of delivering databases. But they managed to turn it around as a team and retrieved the values ​​and products on the website. This allowed them to verify that the formulas and filters worked and to carry out an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) with results, giving them the necessary inputs to present it to the Head of Prevention at one of the stores in Lima.

Results: Reports of 1 week's work to 30 sec y a lot of money saved mucho dinero ahorrado in prevented thefts.

According to Julio, when his Leader tried the MVP, it opened the doors for the team to use it in that particular store and to upload more information, which allowed them to present a conglomerate of thefts per month in Peruvian Soles and make data-driven decisions with all the information. Today this solution is being used in several stores and the IT team will support the project to integrate it well into the company's systems and expand it. But Julio did not stop there. He was so motivated to do this project in a group, that he decided to use the same methodology in an initiative to solve a problem in his work individually. He called it “BusquedApp” (SearchApp) and the problem he sought to solve was to reduce the downtime searching for personnel data in stores that Contact Center employees go through.

He says that after testing his initiative, he has managed to reduce the search time for loose information from 10 minutes to 40 seconds and that today everyone is using it. For his experiment, he investigated several applications that would allow him to: deliver the data, give universal access and test his MVP. That is how he found "Power Apps", and seeing that it met the basic requirements, he tried an initiative in a store and with that information they took it to a series of stores nationwide. Well done Julio!

We have trained thousands of employees from +64 companies. Julio is one of them and his solution brought great savings in time and money, and greater agility in this work.