Unleashing Business Insights with AI-driven Self-Service BI and Big Data

Upcore's analytics solution broke down data silos to provide unified self-service access across the client's vast enterprise landscape. With an integrated view of the business powered by AI-enabled analytics, the world's leading retailer can now execute data-backed strategies to accelerate growth and continued market dominance. The scalable big data foundation unlocks the capability to rapidly uncover actionable insights from increasing data volumes as the company innovates to lead into the future.

Client:

The client is one of the largest retailers in the US, operating a global chain of hypermarkets, discount department stores, and grocery stores. With many locations and millions of customers worldwide, the client generates a massive volume of data daily.

Challenge:

For an organization of this unprecedented size and scale, making data-backed decisions is imperative to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive retail landscape. However, the client had vast amounts of business data trapped in disconnected systems with no way to get a unified view.

Key challenges included:

- Critical customer, sales, inventory, and supply chain data locked in silos
- Inability to connect insights from 3rd party market data
- Delayed reporting affecting agility in responding to market conditions
- Heavy IT dependency for basic self-service analytics
- Data inaccuracies leading to suboptimal business decisions
- Missed growth opportunities due to a lack of holistic visibility

It was clear the company needed a modern enterprise data and analytics platform to harness the potential of its siloed data at scale.

Solution Goals:

The client selected Upcore Technologies as the strategic partner to develop a next-generation analytics solution to meet the following goals:

- Consolidate petabytes of fragmented enterprise data into a unified lake
- Enable self-service access to data spanning hundreds of operational systems
- Empower business users with AI-assisted analytics, visualizations and insights
-Simplify large-scale analysis through natural language queries
- Provide a trustworthy single source of truth across the organization
- Strengthen data governance, security, and access control
- Gain real-time visibility into KPIs to drive faster decision-making
- Identify hidden patterns and opportunities through cross-domain analysis
- Future-proof scalable architecture to support strategic growth

Upcore’s Approach

Upcore formulated a cloud-based solution combining the latest big data, analytics, and machine learning capabilities to address the client’s needs:

1. Flexible Data Ingestion Engine : Collects and integrates structured and unstructured data from across enterprise systems into an AWS data lake.

2. Automated Data Pipelines : Schedules and transforms data as per business logic for analysis-ready, reliable information.

3. Data Catalog : Catalogs ingested metadata for searchability and create a business glossary.

4. Natural Language Search : Enables powerful queries and exploration in conversational language.

5. Smart Data Discovery : Automated insights, correlations, and trends generated through ML algorithms.

6. Customizable Dashboards and Reports : Business users can visualize data, design interactive reports, and set alerts.

7. Role-based Access Controls : Manages user access and permissions through integration with enterprise identity systems.

8. Analytics API Hub : Enables direct analysis by other apps via API requests and webhooks.

With over 300 person-years of effort, Upcore successfully tackled the complexity of creating an enterprise-grade analytics foundation at an unprecedented scale.

Results

- Consolidated 3000+ data sources into a 20 PB cloud data lake
- 50% faster insights with natural language search queries
- 6X growth in internal analytics usage across business units
- Millions in new revenue identified from cross-domain analytics
- Enabled real-time visibility into operations via mobile dashboards
- Automated generation of 1000+ KPI reports and alerts
- Reduced maintenance costs by retiring legacy reporting systems
- Cloud-native system accurately handling 100s of concurrent users
- Granular access controls enhanced data security and compliance

The transformative platform enabled the client to harness the full potential of its data, helping drive enhanced customer experiences, supply chain optimization, targeted marketing, and expansion into new verticals and markets. With comprehensive real-time visibility into operations, the client was empowered to become a truly data-driven organization.

Technologies Used:

Cosmos DB, MS Azure, Gremlin, JanusGraph, Cassandra, Java, Python, Kafka, React, Redis