Company overview

Carrefour group, a French multinational retailer headquartered in Boulogne-Billiancourt, France is one of largest hypermarkets and supermarkets chains in the world with 12,300 self-service shops. In 1995, Majid Al Futtaim got an exclusive franchisee to operate in 38 countries across the Middle East, Africa and Asia and operates 28 hypermarkets, 43 supermarkets.

Challenges

Carrefour uses omni-channel strategy, and it is essential to track customer visits for both online and offline stores, but there was a lack of integration between offline and online stores. Google analytics a tool which was used to track the online stores customer data, did not allow this integration as it was not synced into Netezza which made it difficult to understand the buying behavior of the customers did not allow this integration. Carrefour used SAP BODS (SAP BO Data Services) for the integration of POS files to their existing data warehouse. Additionally, Carrefour needed to track the inventory levels between online and offline stores as data was not synced.

Carrefour had a dedicated team to analyze the offline data manually which became time consuming. The data in their existing data warehouse was not classified into different tables for online data which became a challenge for them in finding the accurate data.

Solution Overview

The goal was to automate the process by using a tool which would scale down manual operation, provide faster processing of reports by integration of the online and offline stores’ data at one data warehouse, keep a record of online and offline customer visits, have accurate track of inventory levels between both the stores and by cutting the cost.

After an evaluation and discussion with the client, we recommended Talend, an open source ETL tool which allowed to keep processes simpler and deliver higher performance analysis of data in Netezza. The client previously used SAP Web Intelligence and Qlik Sense for reporting only the offline data but later we created a combined reports and dashboards for Executives and Human Capital where the management could take decisions based on metrics such as Net sales, Budget, Customers, Average basket, Growth, Sales Vs Budget, Sales Vs Employees, and Store counts.

Carrefour required business queries such as stock units, products types, footfalls, etc. for the online data validation. Hence, we created, classified, and mapped the tables on Netezza for the storing accurate data which could be read easily.
Carrefour UAE was now able to integrate offline and online data which enabled them to scale down manual operation, track inventory levels between both the stores, track record of customer visits and their buying behaviour.

Value delivered

Improved operational efficiency with Digital KPIs integration

Unified scores of business-critical online metrics within the existing data warehouse which enabled Carrefour’s last mile tracking of orders and better customer experience