Transforming to Hadoop for Operational and Analytical Insights

Big Insights technology helps retailer boost earning and expand by 50%

Background

Specialty clothes retailer with 300+ stores and huge online presence. Majority of reporting and analysis were performed on segregated data marts run by each business function. A lot of manual effort was spent on cleaning, integrating and presenting data. Additionally, management had to rely on weekly meetings and 200 page reports to understand the operational and financial aspects of their business. Business was growing fast and data volume also was increasing exponentially.

To address the growing needs of consumers, the board also approved a plan to grow by another 150 stores within 2 years. An analysis of source systems by StratApps indicated an initial volume of 80 TB, with year over year growth of 20TB. This excluded social media feeds from Facebook and Twitter, which on a rolling 7 day period amounted to 10 TB.

The retailer, after looking at 3 different service providers, selected StratApps to advise on technology transformation, implement the transformation and then continue to support the analytics environment.

Approach

The objectives and deliverables were set out initially and the program was managed in conformance with the stated objectives:

1. Define the analytics technology roadmap that can sustain and scale with the growth for next 3 years
2. Create necessary business case, organizational design and service delivery model to support the transformation as well as transformed environment
3. Socialize and get buy in from cross functional stakeholders
4. Evaluate, Suggest and help procure necessary H/W, S/W and Big Insights environment
5. Install, Configure and support Big Insights environment in Development, QA and Production
6. Architect, Design and Implement necessary integrations, transformations and Hive tables required to support business analysis needs
7. Working with business teams, create 2-3 high impact advanced analytic (Predictive) themes that can directly create uptick in sales
8. Provision, Integrate and Enable use of third party public and proprietary data for demographic analysis
9. Provide post production enhancement and support for the new environment

Results

StratApps delivered the stated objectives within 11 months, with the first tangible deliverable for business consumption ready in 4 months from the start of the initiative. StratApps agile model for Big Insights Technology transformation meant that users were always involved, highly responsible and were able to be productive with clean and useful information on a monthly basis. End to End data loading from over 60 source applications take 15 minutes, runs every two hours and Management has visibility to this data instantly via OBIEE models created on top of Hive tables.

StratApps Data Sciences team, working in conjunction with the retailer’s marketing department was able to develop a predictive model for real time offerings on Facebook and Twitter . The model predicted Sphere of Influence and sentiments across Influencers, Followers, Shoppers, Passive Users and naysayers. The retailer achieved a 5% net growth in Online Revenue within the first 2 months.

Note: Our agreement with all parties involved in this initiative restricts us from sharing the identity of the client as well as other confidential information.