Creating a Unified Customer View Across 200+ Brands: Al-Futtaim's Journey
Technology Category
- Functional Applications - Inventory Management Systems
- Robots - Parallel Robots
Applicable Industries
- Consumer Goods
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Procurement
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Demand Planning & Forecasting
- Inventory Management
Services
- Data Science Services
About The Customer
Al-Futtaim is a major economic driver in the Middle East, impacting the lives of millions of people across the region through the distribution and operations of global brands like Toyota, IKEA, Ace Hardware, and Marks & Spencer. The company operates in various sectors including cars, finance, real estate, retail, and health, taking a people-first approach to enrich the lives of consumers. As a customer-centric company, Al-Futtaim seeks to harness the power of its data to help both business units and customers make smarter decisions. Despite having data points from manufacturing and operations, as well as from buying behavior and engagement, Al-Futtaim lacked the ability to unify these disparate data sets in a way that could impact business outcomes.
The Challenge
Al-Futtaim, a major economic driver in the Middle East, operates and distributes a wide range of global brands, generating a wealth of data across these brands. However, their legacy systems struggled to provide a unified view of their customer due to data silos and the inability to scale efficiently to meet their analytical needs. Business intelligence was slow, forecasting was not scalable and was limited to classical algorithms, and customer insights were too generalized to affect outcomes faster. Their data teams were unable to maximize the promise of their data due to memory and CPU constraints, outdated libraries, and inflexible tooling. Data analysts had to wait four to six hours for small amounts of data to process, which slowed both time-to-insights as well as time-to-market of new ideas. The extra time, effort, and resources required to redesign, implement, test, and launch data projects added unnecessary costs, created a greater divide between business units, and ultimately slowed innovation.
The Solution
Al-Futtaim adopted Databricks Lakehouse to modernize their infrastructure and unify their data for all forms of analytics and ML. This platform enabled them to create a 'golden customer record' that improved decision-making from forecasting demand to powering their global loyalty program. The automotive division was able to quickly build ETL pipelines with Delta Lake to fast-track the development of use cases designed to improve customer engagement and sales. With Databricks SQL, a wider range of team members could start manipulating and visualizing the data. User-friendly tooling empowered users to become more autonomous in their data projects, increased adoption to support an AI-centric culture, and allowed highly skilled data science teams to focus without distraction. With a common data layer in Delta Lake, Al-Futtaim was able to create a single customer view for each of its customers for all divisions to leverage.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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