Fiera Milano improves its Customer Experience with Cloud Data solution

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Fiera Milano is the domestic market leader and one of the main integrated operators worldwide in the exhibition and congress sector. Fiera Milano has been listed in the STAR segment of the Euronext Milan stock market since 2002.
To better serve its thousands of customers and millions of visitors, Fiera Milano has embraced a major Digital Transformation, part of its “CONN.E.C.T. 2025” Strategic Plan including a Data Management Program. With the objective to become a data-driven company, the leading fair company has decided to create a new integrated Data Platform. The company awarded Sopra Steria to perform the design, build and implement the Data Platform supporting the entire information assets.

Fiera Milano enables its innovative phygital customer experience to deliver new high-value services

With 4.5 million of annual visitors, 36,000 exhibitors, and 160 congress a year, the Fiera Milano is the ideal partner for the promotion, development, and growth of companies in Italy and abroad. Fashion, home systems, mechanical engineering, tourism, professional hospitality, agri-food, safety, commercial transport, art, and boating are just some of the sectors that Fiera Milano's activity enhances and promotes through directly organised fairs.

The company offers a high-standing experience, in safe, welcoming, and reliable spaces across its 399,000 m². Besides its unique exhibition capabilities, Fiera Milano has also embraced a “phygital” approach including its physical stores and its digital assets such as its websites, its apps, and its e-commerce sites. Fiera Milano is indeed committed to offer its exhibitors and visitors the greatest experience in terms of process efficiency, time to market, commercial approach effectiveness, and product quality.

For this purpose, Fiera Milano wanted to develop high-value services for its customers while extending the features of its existing applications dedicated to internal functions.

Fiera Milano has then requested Sopra Steria to define a new Data Lake and Enterprise Datawarehouse system for the management of its entire information.

A new data analysis and decision-making tools powered by a next-Generation Cloud Data platform

Sopra Steria Digital and Cloud Center of Excellence Teams have assisted Fiera Milano with the design of the Data Lake and Enterprise Datawarehouse solution, the definition of the architecture of the platform, and related system integration activities. Beyond this foundation layer, Sopra Steria has also created the new Data Analytics and Reporting System including use cases. On post-deployment, Sopra Steria Teams have also supported user training and ensured the application management activities to keep user satisfaction high all along the lifecycle of the system.

This new centralised and standardised Data Lake and Enterprise Datawarehouse platform relies on Google Cloud Services (Cloud storage, BigQuery, Data Fusion, Cloud SQL, Analytics) and Tableau. The system aggregates information generated by its CRM based on Salesforce modules (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Cloud Craze, Marketing Cloud), its IVR solution, and 15 other systems including its Ticket Management system, its smart Apps, its website, its smart grid, its logistic and access management system, or its financial systems.

It allows Fiera Milano to take advantage of five main capabilities and benefits: governance of its entire data information; single centralized data repository, containing Fiera Milano’s internal and external information, allowing the correlation of information from Fiera's systems with external data; high data volumetry capabilities; self-service reporting system; analytics system, offering new innovative and remunerative services.

Fiera Milano internal function teams now benefit from advanced analytics tools that provide the insights collected during the events and fairs. They now have a 360° view of the progress of events through KPIs and reports that are easily accessible. The predictive analysis facilitates customer behaviour knowledge, personalisation of services, communication, and campaign activities. In the context of increasing competitiveness and internationalisation of businesses, the solution is a true game changer for enabling targeted cross-selling and up-selling actions.

Moreover, the choice of Google Cloud which operates with carbon-free principles and tends to a carbon-free energy plan by 2030 is reaffirming Fiera Milano’s ESG plans.

“Fiera Milano is playing a fundamental role in the development of Italian companies abroad and confirming Milan, and its exhibition centre as an international hub. Beyond these unique hosting capabilities, we are committed to deliver innovative "phygital" customer experience. This new data platform is a key asset of our advanced integrated services platform sustaining our CONN.E.C.T. 2025 strategic plan”

Alberto Ricchiari

Chief Digital & Technology Officer, at Fiera Milano.

Benefits

  • Unified Cloud-native Data Lake capabilities, unlocking cost savings High-volume capabilities and scalability
  • Ability to quickly implement a first data architecture MVP on GCP
  • Simplified approach for building data-driven applications, from data ingestion, processing, and storage to powerful analytics
  • Consolidated view of customer, and increased customer behaviour knowledge based on an omnichannel data acquisition, including both physical stores and digital assets (sites, Apps, and ecommerce)
  • Personalised services and communication capabilities based on predictive analyses and resale of services
  • Improved campaign capabilities, thanks to cross analysis and effectiveness management tools