Casas Bahia cuts costs by 93% and improves efficiency in the cloud

Challenge: Casas Bahia wanted access to Atlassian’s latest updates and functionality without increasing costs, compromising cross-functional alignment, or the user experience.

Solution: The retailer migrated their Jira and Confluence Data Center instances to Atlassian cloud.

Impact: On Atlassian cloud, Casas Bahia has maximized efficiency; reduced costs; increased agility and security; and gained access to new features.

Discovering the full potential of the cloud

Grupo Casas Bahia, formerly known as Via Varejo, faced the challenge of migrating their highly customized infrastructure to Atlassian cloud, with a goal to optimize processes, reduce costs, and keep up with the latest Atlassian updates.

Since 2017, Grupo Casas Bahia has been using Jira, integrated it with plugins such as EazyBI and ScriptRunner for efficient project management and process automation. Teams rely on Confluence as a repository of knowledge, with strategic customizations to increase visibility into organizational data, ensuring broad access from development teams to senior management. In addition, the company has used Jira to orchestrate their flagship annual project, Black Friday.

The decision to mitigate to Atlassian cloud arose from several needs. Initially, the existing infrastructure (a Data Center plan for 2,000 users) was limiting the evolution of IT because the administrative team had to manage many versions of applications with limited support. However, the main motivation for the migration was the prospect of receiving updates directly from Atlassian in a more agile and efficient way, which would help reduce the burden of maintenance and keep up with the latest innovations. In addition, Casas Bahia looked forward to simpler integrations with other products in the Atlassian cloud suite, especially since they hoped to add other solutions like Jira Product Discovery in the future.

“By migrating to the cloud, we enjoy peace of mind regarding the infrastructure and updates of the application, as Atlassian takes scare of keeping everything up to date to ensure the best versions, availability, and security,” said Agility COE Specialist Daiane Conte.

Initially, the cost of the migration posed an obstacle, as it exceeded 60% of the budget planned for renewal. Through the strategic use of the Atlassian suite and the ability to integrate with third-party applications (such as Whiteboards by Appfire), Casas Bahia centralized their toolset and eliminated other products, significantly reducing costs by 92.5% from R$1.2 million to R$90,000. This financial optimization enabled the Casas Bahia Group to start migrating the cloud without exceeding the annual budget, and it was still possible to generate savings of 15%.

The migration process

After the board approved the company’s Atlassian cloud migration, the team turned their attention to preparing employees for the change.

To face this challenge, there was a constant effort to align with all the different teams and areas, minimize dependencies, and ensure that everyone understood the migration objectives. This required a detailed mapping of dependencies and activities.

The first practical step in the migration process was onboarding users to the cloud environment. Then, the migration team created a test version in the sandbox environment and moved the most critical projects. This allowed them to map out with the QA Team existing functionalities in Data Center and the main points of friction that could interfere with the user experience in the new Cloud version.

“We had some difficulties that were quickly solved, such as the use of HTML in Confluence pages, which was native in the Data Center version. In Cloud, it was easily replaced by the corresponding app,” pointed out Agility COE Analyst Edimara Souza.

With everything in place, the migration team implemented ongoing internal communications to keep employees informed about the migration.

The total migration time was approximately four months, with three months dedicated to preparation and one month for actual migration. Due to the large volume of data in the Jira Server (greater than 1TB), Casas Bahia carried out the migration in phases. Initially, they planned for seven migration phases, but with the help of the Jira and Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant apps, they reduced the number of phases to five, saving over 35 hours of work.

“The migration process has brought us several positive surprises. I highlight the speed of data transmission between the Data Center environment and the Cloud environment, which performed well above expectations, helping us finish the entire migration in 2/3 of the estimated time. In addition, all of [Solution Partner] Nimble’s support throughout the process was essential to solve any difficulties and ensure all the safety of the process. I am very satisfied with the whole experience,” commented Manager at the Agility COE Renato Passero.

The gains of migrating to Atlassian cloud

Casas Bahia’s teams quickly recognized the numerous performance and agility benefits of migrating to Atlassian cloud. Several newer features and solutions were only available in this version, which further enhanced collaboration between internal teams. “Atlassian cloud brought new features that allowed us to sync epics with Atlassian goals, give feedback, do weekly syncing, all on the same platform,” highlighted Agile Tools Team Leader Daiane Conte.

In addition, they’ve seen significant security improvements. The implementation of SSO (single sign-on) has simplified access management — something that was not available in the server mission. In addition, the security offered by Jira Cloud met all the company’s needs, allowing VPN availability and ensuring full access to Confluence content and other features that were previously limited.

Migrating to Atlassian cloud unlocked access to new integrations and features, as highlighted by Viviane Moreira, Analyst at the Agility COE: “One of them was AI. Rovo can optimize processes and increase user efficiency; look for answers; and streamline content editing, summaries, and pages in an easier and more agile way.”

There was also a significant reduction in the time needed to import project data into the company’s Spot Management dashboards. Previously, using Data Center, this process required up to eight hours. However, with the transition to the Cloud version, this time was reduced to just 40 minutes.

Data Center incremental refresh time has also experienced a decrease. Previously, it took about three hours to perform this update, but with the migration to the Cloud, this time reduced to just one hour.

The successful migration to Atlassian cloud reaffirms Casas Bahia’s commitment to adopting advanced technological solutions to optimize operations and strengthen internal collaboration. With significant gains in performance, safety, and efficiency, the company is now poised to continue innovating and leading the retail industry in Brazil.