Big Data Analytics and Visualization for Grocery Retailer

Client Requirements

As one of the largest national grocery retails, the client serves the food shopping needs with approximately 1 500 stores across all states under various retail banners as well as more than 380 retail fuel locations.

The sustainability and growth in the business with sluggish market condition brought several challenges to the client. Customer retention is preferred to be the best principle than customer acquisition. The marketing department wanted to have a proper segmentation with buying behavior of the customers to leverage their marketing budget by executing targeted campaign as well as forecast the growing pattern of customer behavior.

Solution

The solution developed for the client outlined the development of the digital platform is to aid assess performance as well as to make sure that its employees are better informed as well as trained to be able to meet the ever-growing demands in the retail sector and to achieve the objectives set by the client as well as targeted revenue.

The team proposed to build a digital platform using Microsoft SharePoint technology with custom components using Visual Studio. The platform integrated with 3rd party web parts purchased through SharePoint Store and customized using SharePoint Designer. The platform has also integrated with the visualization engine from Tableau which publishes the advanced analytics output to the business stakeholders across all business verticals.

Using an automated script developed by team, the data is now being extracted from the client production server to the staging server in the client environment. Using the business logic and rules, they have transformed the extracted data where the data cleansing, normalization, structure for querying and analysis are made.

Data is graphically visualized using Tableau to provide an insightful dashboard to the top management to be able to assess the performance of all retail stores and channels. This has helped them to identify the need to change their marketing strategy from one region to other based on the advanced analytics, thereby increasing the customer engagement and net worth of the client.

Results

The solution has not only helped the company to save costs, but also increased their customer retention as well as improve billing. The results have increased the revenue collected as well as reduced the marketing spend by customer segments.

Now the company has given the opportunity to implement this solution across all the states in every store format. Some benefits:

• Financial Benefit : CAD 1.80m in revenue growth); CAD 0.36m in cost savings
• Operational Benefit : TAT reduced to T-11 Days for key stakeholders through the BI reporting platform