with one of Australia’s largest retail groups to create a new data ingestion solution
Coles leverage a data analytics process providing critical forecasting information to the business on a weekly basis.
Sales forecasts are utilised by stores around the country to understand their rostering requirements. In order to leverage the new sales forecast, the data had to be imported and the system was hitting performance constraints. This meant that the team at Coles were not able to get this in time which was causing operational challenges.
Coles engaged Ippon Australia to conduct a proof-of-concept around data batching and how this could be potentially improved without altering the downstream solution. The objectives were simple: Produce a small scale PoC application, Demonstrate improved request response times and Identify potential solutions for a potential future solution
After the successful PoC, Coles and Ippon moved forward together to implement a solution that would meet both the needs of Coles now and potential for future.
Given the complexity of the data involved, a large amount of time went into understanding how it was structured and the overall data outcome expected. At a high level it involved taking multiple data structures, combining and manipulating data and finally restructuring into a vastly different format.
Once the data requirements were understood the team went about designing and implementing a solution:
Integrate with the existing downstream solution to provide the data required and then enhanced with modern cloud services to provide durability. To provide Coles with a future path to deal with potential growth the solution was implemented to be horizontally scaled as required (and designed to be easily updated to be an event based solution). Logging and alerting were added to the solution to provide a dynamic solution for support teams (whilst also providing more traceability).
Kmart was able to successfully roll out the robots successfully to over 250 stores generating tangible business benefits
The outcome after testing with production-like loads showed a clear differential:
This was a great outcome, enabling Coles to load double the volume of data in the same amount of time. This provided all stores across the country with a sales projection spanning more weeks than previously available. In turn, it enabled them to plan better and operate more efficiently, saving costs and providing more accurate in-store staffing requirements. From an IT service perspective, the increased speed in the loading of data reduced the risk of service availability, allowing them to respond more quickly if required.
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CLOUD NATIVE IS HERE TO STAY: Software Engineering & Cloud are very much intertwined capabilities. You can’t build modern, flexible software, as a Software Engineer, without an understanding the power, and peril, offered by Cloud computing.
DATA IS THE OLD OIL THE CURRENT DIESEL AND THE NEW BATTERY It’s always been a fuel of business, but the question is no longer the scale of your big data but rather how it can be used.
