Belcorp creates data academy to empower its business areas

About the company

Find out how Belcorp, a leader in the beauty and cosmetics segments in Latin America, redefined its corporate mindset, creating a solid data culture and investing in analytical training for each of its employees through its Data Academy.

Empowering its various business areas with deep-seated analytical knowledge was one of the intended aims of the Data Academy, and Tableau was chosen as the visualization platform to head up the project and revolutionize decision-making in the corporation.

Belcorp is a Peruvian company with a presence in 13 countries and earnings in excess of one billion dollars. Its purpose is “To boost beauty in order to achieve personal fulfillment”, its target public is mainly female, and its leadership, headed up by CEO Erika Herrero Bettarel, highlights female empowerment – whether employees, independent consultants or consumers – as an important ingredient in the essence of its three brands: Ésika, L’Bel and Cyzone.

Belcorp has undergone an evolution in recent years, with a full redesign of its Business Intelligence model. Tableau played a key part in this transformation, and contributed to the company’s continuous two-digit annual growth.

About the company

The history of Belcorp and Tableau’s partnership began in 2018, when the Data & Analytics department, bogged down with a huge demand for business cases, decided to search for solutions to empower its business areas and generate immediate responses to questions it formerly took weeks to attend to.

The solution was to abandon the traditional BI model in favor of a tool that introduced the Self Service BI concept at Belcorp, a process aligned with the digital transformation already initiated by Venkat Gopalan, CTO & CDO (Chief Technology & Chief Digital Officer) of the company.

 Venkat believes in the importance of a change in mindset and in the analytical skills of every individual in the organization, using technology as a facilitator and data analysis as the linchpin of this transformation.

Returning to the conception of Belcorp’s new BI model, in order to involve the business areas, right from the start of the process future users of the tool were called on to evaluate and select the new BI tool. “It was the first time in the history of Belcorp that the business area selected a tool”, beams Lizeth Verano, Business Intelligence Manager.

“I want every single one of our Belcorp employees to have solid data analysis skills, and to adopt and promote them.” - Erika Herrero, Belcorp CEO.

“Very quickly, we were able to decentralize our BI, offering a tool that enabled the areas to construct and personalize their own panels."" We saved dozens of person hours making tables that used to require manual updates and which now update themselves, and practically in real time”- says Lizeth.

Tableau Scaling Strategy

As soon as Tableau was selected as the company’s analytical platform, the Data & Analytics team embarked on a first wave of Tableau training with a group of select users, the Data Rockstars, with participants from all areas of the organization.

Training commenced in Peru and created an interesting challenge for participants: those who finished the training in the shortest time, completing the exercises correctly, could apply to become instructors, and thus travel around the company’s other offices across Latin America delivering training. An interesting personal opportunity to visit a new country, and a professional opportunity to include this experience on their resume.

The strategy was a success and served to show that from now on, the business areas themselves would be responsible for establishing the analytical culture at Belcorp, promoting the data-driven mindset.

With the scaling facilitated by Tableau, the increase in frequency of use and adoption of new ways of working for data analysis created new technical challenges for the team of Data Engineers, who had to completely rethink the data model and architecture in order to support and accompany this transformation at Belcorp.

Belcorp Data Academy

In 2020, the world embarked on a change that took place at an impressive pace, with a hyper-acceleration towards a much more digital consumer and consultant with new needs, and the trends that we thought we would see in 3 to 5 years became reality in a matter of weeks and months.   

Within the organization, we defined the Belcorp 2.0 strategy with ambitious goals that challenged us to explore new ideas swiftly and collaboratively. The digital and technological transformation demanded new skills of us, and this is why we launched Belcorp Academy, a training program focused on upskilling and reskilling, to improve and develop the key skills that will enable us to face the future successfully, quickly and flexibly.

Priority was given to developing personalized experiences for consumers and consultants through data and analytics. This is how Belcorp Data Academy came into being, with the vision of leading the beauty industry as a company powered by Artificial Intelligence and data-based decisions.

Belcorp Data Academy represents a change in mindset, behaviors and the ways we work. A project constructed under the sponsorship of Venkat (CTO & CDO) along with the Data & Analytics team and with the support of the Learning & Development team, to become the transformation Belcorp needs to successfully accomplish its strategy.

 “We took on the challenge of designing an training offer with new strategies, measuring the learning results and promoting a change in the behavior of employees to ensure data-based decision-making. Evolving our traditional descriptive analyses, which only looked at the past, to predictive and prescriptive analyses, increasing the value we offer our consumers and consultants,” Lizeth explains.

The construction of Belcorp Data Academy was an intense, highly-detailed process that involved coaching sessions with more than three groups of external consultancy firms, the support of Tableau’s Customer Success team and the influence of renowned cases in the industry. We weren’t looking to reinvent the wheel.

“We started by defining why it was important that everybody should be aware of the power of data, and to do so we defined a learning route that standardized the basic concepts of data analysis and artificial intelligence, which would be incorporated into our entire organization,” adds Lizeth.

Belcorp Data Academy was born with a very clear mission and set of values: “Empowering business people with technological skills that enable them to make decisions based on data, and doing so by providing them with the best analytics development program on the market.”

To achieve this mission, 5 gradual objectives were established: Understanding the value of data, promoting a data-based culture, mastering data analysis, mastering storytelling and mastering artificial intelligence.

“Based on these objectives, we designed the academy and its differentiating factors: personalized role-based learning path, alliance with leaders from the educational market, evaluation of learning with the KirkPatrick model and gamification strategy,”  says Lizeth, adding: “To ensure the success of the implementation, we decided it was key to call on business allies who, along with the Data Rockstars, would be the main promoters of the initiative in their teams.”

These business allies work in collaboration with the Belcorp Data Academy team to ensure fulfillment of the indicators and guarantee that the goals and learnings are valuable for the entire organization.

The strategy was crafted on the basis of a pyramid with specific objectives and roles for each learning level. At the base of the pyramid are the Data Literate Consumers, business analysts who had little or no data knowledge until a short while ago. The aim of this role is to offer them the knowledge that would enable them to understand, analyze and obtain insights into the data, which will, in turn, enable us to ensure that all our strategies are aligned with our commercial results.

The next, more specialist level, is that of the Data Rockstars, who are trained and offer technological tools such as: Tableau Desktop, access to Databases and Google Analytics, enabling responses to commercial questions and creating dashboards to enable automated, faster decision-making.  The Data Rockstars also have the role of creating new dashboards to improve operations in their business unit, enabling them to focus on the creation of new commercial strategies.

Then we have the Storyteller role, whose objective is to narrate and sustain the impact of the commercial strategies by creating eye-catching and analytically-effective stories using data. They become specialists who not only possess broad analytical knowledge but have the ability to communicate effectively, enabling the results of their analyses to be understood quickly by the entire organization.

On the next level, we have the Analytics Experts, who make descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analyses to increase the efficiency of decision-making on all levels of the business. Analytics Experts are the highest inspirations within the specialist roles within the whole organization. 

In order to bring about the adoption of these new behaviors and the change in mindset, it is vital to have active participation from the leaders, which is why an executive-level training was envisaged with the development of two roles: on the one hand, the Team Leader, whose objective is to promote analytical power in their team and challenge current analytical standard with the aim of increasing operational efficiency and generating greater value for the company.

And on the other hand, we have the Business Leader, who is responsible for promoting data-based decision-making, focused at all times on improving and transforming the business through analysis and artificial intelligence.

In order to train these professionals with their very diverse profiles, Belcorp joined forces with the specialized education firm Udacity to offer a training program which, in addition to a solid theoretical base, includes practical use cases the students have to solve during the course.

This training began with an initial pilot scheme involving 8 Data Rockstars who completed a nanodegree and provided some important constructive feedback: To really develop analytical skills, it is important that the examples used on the courses are similar to the students’ everyday experience, and that functions like connection to Google Analytics and Facebook are implemented during the course. This gave us the input to create personalized and potential training courses which were much better at encouraging participation and obtaining specific results.  And today we have over 100 Data Rockstars who have completed nanodegrees.

 One of the most important ways in which a data-driven culture was promoted at Belcorp was via gamification where, using a points system, we motivated employees to take part in different events, talks and challenges. With the support of the Talent and Culture team, communities were fostered in Teams and Workplaces to focus on boosting data literacy.

The quest for points, prizes and personal growth gave rise to a high level of participation in the events created by the Belcorp Data Academy, from LIVEs dealing with data handling issues and using Tableau, to participation in the Belcorp AI FEST and successful completion of the different courses on offer. We intend to continue making use of this in future events focused on storytelling and data visualization, to continue promoting participation, interaction and data-based decisions.

One outstanding event was the Belcorp AI festival, which consisted of 5 days of full-on knowledge, experiences, inspiration and calls to action. Every single employee left the event convinced that their ideas are the starting point for changing the world and this will allow us to carry on challenging ourselves to take the next step hand-in-hand with artificial intelligence and advanced analytics, in order to offer our consumers the very best experience.



Belcorp AI Festival managed to bring in minds from the leading companies in different industries such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, Udacity, Sprinklr, Mars, Atlan, Abacus AI, Mu Sigma, IBM, Perfect Corp, Inetum and Globant. Their CEOs and leaders shared with us the future of Artificial Intelligence as well as trends from around the world. In addition, they shared their opinions, experiences and best practices, which left all the employees with a great deal of knowledge and inspiration to be better and successfully meet the challenges of today's world.

The inclusion of recreational events, challenges and games has helped Belcorp’s internal platform achieve an extremely positive reception, with thousands of daily visits and dashboards created. We now have over 3,000 registered users, taking data-based decisions and exploring new possibilities.

We intend to carry on supporting this growth and offering tools and support to our users so that they can continue to explore the world of data. We create new activities, challenges and ways of relating to users in order to continue, every day, to make Belcorp a company with a data-driven focus from top to bottom.

“At first identifying an employee who wanted, and was able, to fulfill the role of Data Rockstar was complex and tedious. Now that they are more aware of the implications and impact of this role, we receive lots of requests from employees interested in being trained up for it, as the distinguished value proposal that was created with the Belcorp Data Academy has opened up access to courses and certificates that are recognized globally and add weight to their career.”

To evaluate the progress of the Data Academy, the Belcorp team uses the Kirkpatrick model designed for analyzing and evaluating the results of educational programs. It takes any training style, whether informal or formal, into consideration in order to determine aptitude based on four levels of criteria. “Level 1: Reaction” measures how participants react to the training, and here what we are concerned with is the degree of satisfaction with the training they receive. On this level we have the NPS indicator. In “Level 2: Learning”, we want to know whether they truly absorbed the knowledge.  And here we use the metrics RCI (Reliable Change Index) and SID (Standard Individual Difference), which are calculated after inputting the results of each employee before and after assessment, having completed a course and checked whether they truly understood the training. “Level 3: Behavior” looks at whether they are utilizing what they learned at work and changes in conduct are taking place. The metric of weekly active and concurrent users on Tableau is used for this purpose. Finally, Level 4 lists the results and determines whether the material had a positive impact on the business/organization. 

Using this model at Belcorp, and having these visible metrics during the implementation of the Belcorp Data Academy, has enabled us to quickly identify areas for improvement for any new initiative launched, not only in terms of implementing new courses, but also in events we have launched as part of the gamification process. When we see an initiative that is not having a positive impact on any of the variables, we call the Data Rockstars in to obtain feedback and implement the necessary changes to ensure every action coming out of the Belcorp Data Academy has a direct, positive impact on the Kirkpatrick model markers.

IMPACT ON BELCORP

To date, Belcorp is extremely proud to have achieved:

• Training of over 2,000 employees with basic concepts in the Data Literate Consumer role.
• Creation of the Data Academy community in Workplace with over 1,500 people who collaborate with one another and promote the data-driven mindset. 
• Organization of the first Artificial Intelligence event which brought together over 1,700 employees and was attended by more than 10 guest speakers from companies leading in Artificial Intelligence.
• Having more than 3,000 active users on Tableau who have created over 11,000 dashboards and more than 300 data sources, which generate over 18,000 visits a day. 

All of these data prove that Belcorp is moving forward on its path to becoming a Data-Driven Company, promoting the application of learned concepts and fostering data-based decision-making in its employees in their day-to-day work. Cultivating a data culture represents just the start of a project aimed at taking Belcorp to new levels. And what a start! “Tableau has grown in leaps and bounds; once everyone began to see its potential we received numerous requests for access, everyone wanted to have eye-catching reports. Everybody wanted to use the tool. In just a minute, you can change so many things on Tableau, and everyone wants access to that agility. We have already started to witness impacts in areas like product line evaluation and monitoring in (almost) real time, enabling our planning team to make quick decisions, segmented by geographical location,” says Lizeth Verano. For Belcorp, this is only the start of the long road it wishes to travel. We know that talent is the fundamental basis for achieving digital transformation changes and we want to give our employees the tools and training necessary for them to become ever-better versions of themselves and be able to deal with today's disruptive world. We believe in the power of ideas and the power of inspiration that lies in each and every one of us. Ultimately, if we have happy employees that will be reflected in happy customers,” says Venkat Gopalan.