Databricks Case Studies Creating a Unified Customer View Across 200+ Brands: Al-Futtaim's Journey

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	Creating a Unified Customer View Across 200+ Brands: Al-Futtaim's Journey Databricks

Creating a Unified Customer View Across 200+ Brands: Al-Futtaim's Journey

Databricks

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
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 Their data teams were unable to maximize the promise of their data due to memory and CPU constraints, outdated libraries, and inflexible tooling.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. Read More
About 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. Read More
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. Read More Log in to view content
Contents

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

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.

About 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.

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.

Impact #1	Since moving to Databricks Lakehouse Platform, Al-Futtaim has been able to quickly deploy new use cases throughout the organization, delivering insights to business stakeholders four times faster than before. The improved data sharing and collaboration enabled via Delta Sharing has accelerated time-to-market. Al-Futtaim has been able to influence supply chain efficiency, marketing and sales, and customer engagement. For example, they recently productionized an order forecasting and inventory management model for one of their retail businesses, Marks & Spencer. Using segmentation and personalization, the division that drives Toyota sales leveraged recommendation engines to market their new UAE automobiles to specific audiences. Equipped with unified customer and operational data across their brands, Al-Futtaim’s business units are now able to create an unobstructed view of customer lifetime value.

Impact #1

Since moving to Databricks Lakehouse Platform, Al-Futtaim has been able to quickly deploy new use cases throughout the organization, delivering insights to business stakeholders four times faster than before. The improved data sharing and collaboration enabled via Delta Sharing has accelerated time-to-market. Al-Futtaim has been able to influence supply chain efficiency, marketing and sales, and customer engagement. For example, they recently productionized an order forecasting and inventory management model for one of their retail businesses, Marks & Spencer. Using segmentation and personalization, the division that drives Toyota sales leveraged recommendation engines to market their new UAE automobiles to specific audiences. Equipped with unified customer and operational data across their brands, Al-Futtaim’s business units are now able to create an unobstructed view of customer lifetime value.

Benefit #1	10% higher automotive sales
Benefit #2	30% decrease in loss sale opportunity and inventory holding cost
Benefit #3	4x faster time-to-insight

Benefit #1

10% higher automotive sales

Benefit #2

30% decrease in loss sale opportunity and inventory holding cost

Benefit #3

4x faster time-to-insight

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Overview

Creating a Unified Customer View Across 200+ Brands: Al-Futtaim's Journey

Operational Impact

Quantitative Benefit