Centralizing global sales data for 100+ countries by building a data and analytics platform on AWS cloud with Snowflake.
The client is a renowned global QSR chain with the presence in 146 countries, boasting 27,760 locations. The brand has recorded an impressive annual revenue of $31 billion in 2022. While the client faced a growth decline at the outset of the pandemic, it swiftly regained its momentum and continued to thrive in the pandemic era and beyond. This resurgence was primarily attributed to its strategic focus on engaging with customers through digital channels to boost sales on its website, proprietary app, and food delivery platforms. Remarkably, the company exhibits no signs of slowing down in its growth trajectory.
In late 2020, despite the global upswing in digital sales for the fast-food giant, the company encountered a substantial challenge in reporting the proportion of digital sales to its investors. The process was exceedingly laborious, consuming nearly six weeks of effort from the corporate finance and marketing teams. Their task involved collecting, preparing, validating top-line sales performance data, assessing channel performance, and calculating essential growth indicators for over 100 countries worldwide.
Recognizing this challenge as an opportunity, the client’s global data strategy team embarked on an initiative to design and establish a brand-new greenfield cloud data platform. This platform aimed to centralize the sales and customer data from around the world. Importantly, this new global data platform was envisioned to serve as a reusable template for other markets and countries who were on their journey to modernize their legacy data platforms.
Brillio was chosen as the partner to drive the data transformation for the client due to our ability to provide the right blend of strategy and implementation. Brillio started with a comprehensive assessment of the data landscape across key global markets, which collectively contributed to over 90% of the client’s global revenue.
Subsequently, Brillio recommended AWS cloud with Snowflake on which standardized data models for both sales and customer domains would be designed. These recommendations have been widely embraced by numerous regions across the globe, including the UK, the rest of Europe, the Asia-Pacific (APAC), and Latin America (LATAM).
Brillio successfully onboarded the most granular sales and customer data from over 100 countries which also involved the creation of dashboards that unveiled previously undiscovered insights.
Brillio’s design and implementation work extended beyond the client but also the sub-brand companies. As a result, Brillio was entrusted with advising on data strategy and implementing regional data platforms for UKI and Western Europe. Brillio has also been invited to lead the development of a data strategy and oversee the implementation of a regional data platform for the CIS and eastern European countries. Brillio’s expertise extends to advising the UKI leadership on democratizing data through a marketplace featuring high-value data and AI use cases.
Brillio implemented a 4-phase hybrid-agile methodology across globally, UK, and Western Europe.
Discovery: Brillio’s data discovery accelerators were used to map the data landscape and gauge the schema, and quality of data. Brillio managed the entire end-to-end initiative, overseeing strategy development, central data platform implementation, and managed services.
Gap assessment: Design thinking workshops were conducted to understand aspirations and gaps to evaluate tools, create use cases roadmap and estimate total cost of ownership. The data strategy formulation encompassed a comprehensive evaluation, including current state assessment & gap analysis, tool selection, architectural planning, roadmap creation, establishment of an operating model, and defining use cases.
Recommendations: Developed solution design, and detailed design which covered, data models, data privacy, data governance framework and organization design, cloud security, automation. A blueprint for data platform implementations worldwide was crafted, which included designing solution architecture, and the creation of valuable assets like data models, and reusable software code which were adopted by UKI and Western Europe, and other countries within APAC.
Implementation: Implemented the strategy through virtual agile teams in a hub and spoke model, successfully onboarding the lowest grain data available into the global data platform.
Eventually, a global analytical platform was built on AWS cloud with Snowflake for data warehouse capabilities. Brillio implemented and supported AWS/Snowflake cloud data platform for client’s global team and major European markets, spanning over 100 countries.
This platform enabled the generation of next-day sales reports and offered a comprehensive 360-degree view of digital customer behavior. In addition, from a master data perspective, menu items (products) across more than 50 countries were categorized into global categories, facilitating a unified menu view, and streamlining sales tracking for core product performance.
The company’s UKI region transitioned to a dependable and high-performing data platform. The previous on-premises data warehouse was plagued by weekly failures, caused delays in performance insights and actions. The new cloud data platform is not only reliable but also 3-4 times more performant, capable of processing real-time transactional data, with millions of transactions daily.
The Europe region realized estimated technology cost savings of 3-4 times per country by transitioning to a regional cloud data platform instead of going alone.
