UK Retailer — Data Strategy

retail case study

Summary

A UK retail and banking company needed a data strategy and a data platform to pursue reinventing the customer experience and improving store optimization.

Silicon Valley Data Science delivered a data strategy, architecture blueprint, as well as phased roadmap with a clear set of options and investment recommendations.

Background and Business Problem

A prominent UK retail and banking company sought to further develop its big data capabilities in pursuit of its strategic imperatives and evolving business requirements. Specifically, they needed to identify an enterprise-wide data strategy to build a next-generation analytics platform that could scale to deliver current and future needs across the lines of businesses. Use cases from their top priority business programs include developing a customer loyalty program, enabling store optimization techniques, meeting regulatory requirements, and creating other various data-centric services for internal and external users.

With their existing data platform that resides on a complex, tightly integrated, on-premise enterprise data warehouse (EDW), the company recognized that they were not able to keep pace with the current demands of both customers and internal business clients, and were not able to scale to meet projected future needs. As the company was facing immense pressure to increase profits in a competitive landscape, the company needed a strategy to pivot to newer technologies that can quickly meet the demands of the business, and scale for the future. Further, while understanding the potential of new technologies such as Hadoop, the company had limited internal understanding of building and maintaining these systems.

Solution

Through an agile data strategy project, SVDS conducted over 600 interviews across lines of businesses and evaluated over 130 use cases and technical workloads to develop a strategic prioritized workload assessment and capability assessment that prescribed a set of “Horizons”—a phased approach of high-impact development initiatives for the company that delivers value early and incrementally. The initiatives span data across customers, channels, colleagues, products, pricing and promotions, and the supply chain, and serves use cases such as personalized product recommendations, similarities in basket purchases for shelf optimization, and data protection act compliance.

Core needs addressed by this platform:

  • visibility into the full breadth and depth of customer touch points
  • moving beyond transactions to interactions and observations
  • optimization of customer journeys and customer experience
  • empowerment of colleagues to respond to customer needs in a data-driven way

Further, the platform would enable analytical capabilities for marketing, promotions, BI and analytics, operational analytics, sales transaction analytics, and pricing.

The team presented the executive committee and board a clear set of options and investment recommendations. Based on this guidance, our client is currently working with our agile development teams to build out the data platform for three divisions of the business.

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