Natura Launches and Optimizes New Sales Platform for Consultants on AWS

In 2019, Natura launched its new sales platform for its consultants in beauty sales. The Global Sales Platform (GSP) now incorporates Natura's full commercial ecosystem, composed of three other platforms: Registration, Management of the Direct Sales Commercial and Relationship Model, and Digital Services for consultants and sellers.

"With the construction of GSP and its incorporation into our Commercial Platform product portfolio, we planned the first full stack deployment and chose Peru as the first country to receive all integrated platforms. It was a highly-competitive market, but at the same time had high capacity to carry out tests with the new perspectives that the platforms brought,” says Mario Santiago, director of commercial platforms for Natura &Co LATAM.

"GSP was built with a completely revised architecture—oriented to microservices and events—something totally innovative at Natura to support our consultants’ order-capture process,” says Renzo Petri, the head of cloud platform engineering & devOps at Natura. The company’s novel platform uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) components on a large scale to support scalability and deliver agile launch potential.

The first implementation faced challenges from several perspectives: high functional range, including business logic aggregations due to integration between components from different sales platforms; beauty consultant's goals; indicators analysis; implementation of non-functional components and operational aspects (monitoring with APM, 24/7 support for new country expansions); security level improvements during the beauty consultant's journey; and reliability of the most critical components in the distributed system.

"After our first full stack deployment, the Natura family has expanded. The challenges previously projected became much greater with the formation of Natura &Co LATAM, composed of Natura, Avon, The Body Shop and Aesop in the region. It was at that moment that we concluded that it was worth counting on collaboration with our provider for the overall optimization of the platform, focusing on the growth expectations of the group in this new stage of our history," says Santiago. "Aspects such as performance, scalability, resilience, cost reduction, and security were the main pillars of this work. We sought to advance in parallel on all relevant fronts of the platform, already preparing for our future expansion plans.”

AWS was a clear choice for continued iteration on the GSP, as Natura had originally built the platform on AWS. Natura chose AWS Professional Services to perform an AWS Well-Architected Framework Review on the GSP project. "We were clear on where we wanted to go, but we needed direction, a broad analysis, and support in executing the various dimensions of the platform. And for this, we identified AWS as the best provider to support our evolution," Petri recalls.

In late 2019, work began focusing on the evaluation and review of various infrastructure, architecture, and engineering components of the platform. For 8 weeks, a collaborative team of 15 involved members was responsible for analyzing each module of the platform.

At the end of this period, the team produced robust set of recommendations, which were prioritized and reviewed with the goals of improving the consultants’ experience with GSP and to prepare the platform for expansion into new geographies. "The joint work of the Natura &Co and AWS teams was fundamental for the centering the strategic vision of the group in the process of prioritizing the backlog,"  says Marcio Abdullatif, senior manager and leader of the GSP team.

AWS Professional Services acted as an orchestrator in meetings with the different technical teams involved in the work to identify and plan for next steps, in addition to developing proofs of concept for the proposed solutions. "We achieved very strong engagement from everyone involved. Developers, architects, and infrastructure engineers worked together to generate solutions that deliver positive impact on our consultants' experience," Abdullatif says. 

Today, GSP is operational 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 Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Cognito, and AWS CloudTrail.