Leading the way in impact measurement and management
Natura uses Databricks to accelerate socioenvironmental impact measurement
Faster production and time to insights of ESG impact
Reduction in manual data processing for better strategic analysis
Increase in data granularity for more precise insights
In an era where consumers demand transparency and sustainability, Natura’s pioneering spirit has set the standard, valuing natural ingredients from the forest in a fair and prosperous relationship with communities. Along with their core values, the company has established an intrinsic connection with sustainability based on their unwavering foundational commitment to measuring environmental, social and governance (ESG) impact across their business. However, the beauty brand faced the challenge of consolidating data from over 65 internal systems — the critical ingredient to fully understanding how they meet their sustainability goals. By leveraging the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, Natura unified their diverse data sources on the lakehouse architecture, automated complex workflows and integrated seamlessly with Tableau for real-time reporting and business intelligence dashboarding. This innovation slashed Natura’s iP&L (Integrated Profit and Loss) reporting time from four months to just one week. With Databricks, Natura is now more capable than ever in achieving their sustainability goals and paving the way for future regenerative initiatives.
Experiencing ESG bottlenecks due to fragmented data
Natura, a trailblazing Brazilian multinational cosmetics company, has dedicated themselves to sustainable development since their founding in 1969. With a mission to create products that enhance the well-being of the individual, community and planet, Natura works directly with communities in the Amazonian region and pioneered a carbon-neutral business strategy. Partnering with over 3.5 million beauty consultants around the globe, the company committed to measuring their social and environmental impact through their Integrated Profit and Loss (iP&L), an impact monetization framework built around the idea of achieving a net positive impact beyond financials. A believer in a “regenerative economy” — an economic system that goes beyond sustainability, usually related to offsetting and mitigation, but promotes the restoration of the value chain, with inclusivity and equity — Natura relied on 70+ indicators for strategic and performance monitoring, which their teams needed to report to various stakeholders (internal and external).
However, achieving this vision came with considerable challenges. Natura’s data is fragmented across over 65 different systems — amounting to nearly one for every year in business — making data analysis extremely difficult. As Alexandre da Rocha Leão, Sustainability and Impact Lead at Natura, stated, “Consolidation was a huge task, especially considering annual reporting and performance processes for sustainability. We’d been tracking numerous public commitments and internal targets for decades, which required extensive data management. We got to the point where we needed a comprehensive solution, but we initially had trouble finding one that met our needs.”
Regardless, Natura needed to unify structured, unstructured and alternative data types for a holistic view of their socioenvironmental impact. Especially crucial for reaching their decarbonization targets, and considering that data is a vital factor for this strategy, Natura has developed several internal solutions, which include an environmental calculator to compile detailed product information, such as ingredients and packaging. This is one of the complex sets of solutions (e.g., systems, business intelligence, dashboards, etc.) generated by data from Human Resources, Finance, R&D, Procurement, SHE (Security, Health and Environment), Supply Chain and other departments. These solutions are highly strategic but haven’t been developed in connected silos and so didn’t provide a consolidated view of Natura's sustainability journey.
Finally, Natura’s existing processes were largely manual, relying heavily on separate spreadsheets and disjointed email communications. This highly complex environment required an exhaustive concentration of effort to achieve accurate results. Additionally, it became even more challenging to integrate new business units and processes into sustainability metrics as the company continued to expand. Because different teams managed data and indicators, extensive time and resources were required to maintain them. Moreover, many stakeholders needed more technical expertise to visualize and interpret this data, making it challenging to make informed decisions and increasing development pressure.
Unifying sources to better understand sustainability efforts
To rectify their disparate data sources and move toward a unified lakehouse architecture, Natura invested in the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, starting with Delta Lake. Delta Lake consolidated data from Natura’s many separate systems, enabling downstream analytics and a holistic understanding of the beauty brand’s impact on environmental, social and human capital. Because Delta Lake allowed Natura to handle diverse data types efficiently, the team ultimately gained a more accurate view of their sustainability metrics. The project was a collaborative effort among the Sustainability team, PSW Digital Business Consultancy and Natura’s Digital Technology team. This included significant contributions from the Agile, Architecture, Data Hub and Projects teams, ensuring a comprehensive and integrated approach. Gabriel de Moura, Head of Sales at PSW Digital, reported, “The Automation Project for Natura’s ESG Indicators served as a laboratory for us to explore the most advanced functionalities of Databricks. During this partnership, the team also deepened their knowledge of ESG by learning from Databricks. The project’s future presents significant challenges, but the goal is to achieve excellence in data and ESG.”
Pulling data from Delta Lake, Databricks Workflows automated data ingestion and processing, which Tableau then accessed through Databricks connectors for real-time ESG reporting and data visualization. After integrating almost 100 Excel spreadsheets into the Databricks Platform, the Natura team created 20+ centralized dashboards and 15 new, automated workflows in Tableau — eliminating their prior manual, susceptible-to-error methods. These dashboards could be viewed by any employee at the company, despite the nature of their role (with a given permission). This automation significantly simplified the data processing tasks, allowing Natura to maintain up-to-date data and generate timely reports. This shift drastically reduced the manual effort involved and improved the overall efficiency of their data management. Leão clarified, “Even with these improvements, business intelligence was not our end game. It wasn’t ever just about reporting, but about understanding reliable and methodologically sound data that could guide the design of a truly regenerative business.”
To ensure robust data governance and access controls, Natura utilized Databricks Unity Catalog, allowing the company to manage data policies effectively and secure access to sensitive data and insights. Layered on top of Delta Lake and Unity Catalog, cluster management with autoscaling dynamically adjusted compute resources to handle all of these various data processing tasks, ensuring optimal performance, cost-efficiency and seamless integration for better outcomes. Looking ahead, Natura plans to explore advanced analytics with Databricks GenAI tool, AI/BI Genie. Genie will allow Natura’s Sustainability team to engage with their data using natural language queries to provide immediate, relevant answers backed by Databricks SQL.
Enhancing decision-making and more with automation and AI
The Databricks Platform has significantly improved Natura, particularly in efficiency gains. The time required to generate their iP&L statement was drastically reduced from four months to just one week, a 16-fold improvement. This efficiency saved valuable time and allowed Natura’s Sustainability team to focus on high-value tasks like scientific research, methodology development and business analysis rather than getting bogged down in data processing.
Another significant benefit that Databricks has brought to Natura is enhanced decision-making. Managers can now access the real-time environmental and social impact of the beauty brand’s operations through their iP&L tool. Leão concluded, “Databricks helped us prove that integrating sustainability and business data is as possible as it is fruitful. This project has shown us how to combine different data types to make smarter and more impactful decisions as a business.”
Moving forward, Databricks will continue to prepare Natura for the future with automation and advanced analytics. Natura is exploring more AI and machine learning tools to assist with predictive analytics and scenario planning. This will enable Natura to simulate scenarios and determine if they can meet the impact metrics they’ve set. By democratizing their iP&L models, Natura aims to assist their partners in their sustainability efforts to achieve a fourfold positive socioenvironmental impact relative to net sales by 2030. With Databricks, Natura has found a solid partner in these initiatives that will be pivotal in the business’s commitment to sustainability and innovation.
