Retailer
Data Warehouse Rescue and Single Customer View
Challenge
The Data & Insight Director of a well-known premium retail group was concerned about the high burn rate and slow progress of a complex data engineering project being delivered by a Big Four consultancy. The client invited CVM People to undertake a quality and cost assessment of the ongoing Data Warehouse and Single Customer View project.
This project was intended to be a key enabler of new offer management and personalisation efforts across three brands. Any delays would result in a cascading effect on the midterm ambitions of the business.
Over an initial six-week project review, it became clear that the project had some major challenges and had already been through the hands of another global IT house in an earlier failed attempt. The primary issues fell into the following categories:
- Poor processes and working practices between the client and its chosen partner.
- A lack of alignment and clarification of ownership/RACI, hampering problem-solving and decision-making.
- The wrong people in the wrong roles across the project.
- A delivery model heavily weighted towards management and senior consultants, with too little technical development and design resource.
Solution
After the initial review, it was agreed that delivery of the project in its current guise was simply unrealistic. The mutual decision was made for the incumbent to wind down and hand over to a new team.
The client asked us to stay on and assume responsibility for the delivery of the project, providing project management, design, and engineering services. Our delivery model focused on a smaller number of highly skilled, experienced resources in key roles, with all extraneous, junior, and non-delivery critical resources removed from the team. This allowed for a significant ramp-up in design and build capacity.
On the client side, we realigned the internal resources engaged on the project, ways of working, and requirement/feedback loops to improve clarity and pace. This gave the client a better sense of control and ensured information was disseminated quickly, allowing for blockers to be cleared and decisions made at the appropriate levels.
The Single Customer View (SCV) provided a unified view of customers across three brands and a range of retail and financial services product holdings. This created a complete, group-level understanding of customers for the first time in the organisation’s history. Drawing from over 100 source systems, the SCV informed analytic views for Campaign Decisioning, Machine Learning, Customer Insight, BI, Trading, and Commercial Planning.
One of the key purposes of the warehouse was to facilitate centralised customer base management, driving cross-sell/upsell, loyalty, and proactive retention through a unified commercial plan, whilst also supporting the CRM activities of the individual brands. This required the management of a large number of predictive ML models supporting CLV, churn, and propensities for a range of long and short-term campaign objectives. To facilitate this, a modelling automation layer was also added.
Finally, we put in place a new operating model and recruited the correct permanent resources to ensure internal ownership of all processes, tools, and platforms for the final product, ensuring a low TCO and maximum control for the client.
Results
The warehouse, Single Customer View, and supporting team builds were successfully completed within 15 months.
- In the final phase, we introduced the permanent resource into the new operating model, transitioning our resources off as handovers were completed to ensure a smooth transition and high-degree of knowledge transfer.
- Two of our experts remained with the team for the next six months to ensure bedding-in and ongoing development of the overall data warehouse happened in line with expectations.
- Overall, the solution dramatically improved data variety, velocity, and quality for insight, campaign decisioning, and commercial planning. Off the back of this success, a long-term client relationship was formed, which has seen us engage on a range of diverse projects from commercial
