Bakery Franchise: Modernizing the Data Architecture, Enabling Real-time Data Insights

Bakery Franchise:

Modernizing the Data Architecture, Enabling Real-time Data Insights

Industry: Retail & CPG

Delivery Center: Europe

Industry Context

The food industry has experienced a significant surge in direct-to-consumer (D2C) buying trends. The pandemic accelerated the shift towards digital commerce. As a result, customers are now accustomed to conveniences like on-demand online ordering, a trend that emerged during the pandemic but has since become a standard expectation. This exerted a substantial influence on the baking sector, prompting bakeries to explore online avenues and leverage data analytics for insights into customer preferences, efficient inventory management, and improved production processes. Digitization reflects the change in consumer behavior that underscores the crucial need for businesses to embrace technology to gain a competitive edge.

Client Challenge

The client is a successful bakery franchise with 500+ locations across the United States and Canada. Renowned for its cakes, the franchise had embraced the challenge of adapting to evolving consumer preferences and market dynamics. The client’s outdated data infrastructure was no longer meeting the growing needs of the diverse customer base. Legacy systems and outdated data practices posed a significant obstacle, impairing the efficient collection, processing, and analysis of vital data. Building a comprehensive data analytics system was crucial for understanding customer behavior, optimizing inventory management, and enhancing production processes. Incomplete and unreliable information further impeded the client’s capacity to make well-informed business decisions regarding marketing strategies, market expansion plans, and resource allocation endangering their competitive stance and future growth prospects.

Approach

Encora conducted a comprehensive assessment of the client's infrastructucture needs and recommended Snowflake for its ability to convert data warehousing and analytics into a single, easy-to-use cloud platform.

Specifically, Snowflake provides automatic and virtually unlimited scalability that enables the client to handle growing data volumes without manual intervention. Moreover, Snowflake’s cloud architecture faccilitates swift query performance, helping the client with real-time data insights crucial for quick business decisions. Snowflake’s intuitive SQL-based interface accelerates analyst productivity, empowering the client with easy data sharing.

Leveraging Snowflake, Encora shaped a strategic roadmap to modernize the client's data architecture and unlock impactful business insights.

Cloud Migration: Alleviated the current hardware burden and ensured a steady stream of bandwidth to facilitate smooth real-time transmission and sharing of extensive data volumes.

Product Modernization: Migrated analytics capabilities to a modern framework, incorporating operational data to fuel near real-time analysis.

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC): Overhauled data pipeline processes for cloud compatibility while phasing out on-premises servers.

Data Analytics, Visualization & BI: Leveraging Snowflake’s robust infrastructure, our data science and engineering expertise empowered the client to unleash their data’s full potential, facilitating informed decision-making and strategic innovations.

Test Strategy & Planning: Enforced contemporary quality engineering practices on Snowflake to establish a dependable and efficient data ecosystem for accurate and consistent insights.

Snowflake Services

Data Warehousing

Data Integration

Data Marketplace

Results

By modernizing data architecture through Snowflake implementation, Encora revolutionized the client’s legacy analytics process plagued by siloed data and time lag. The implementation of Snowflake not only modernized the client's data architecture but also positioned them for continued success in a rapidly evolving market.

Snowflake-enabled transformation gained significant results for the client:

Enhanced Inventory Management: With timely data access, the client could make more accurate and efficient inventory decisions, reducing overstock and minimizing stockouts. This led to a reduction in inventory holding costs.

Improved Customer Insights: The ability to analyze customer buying trends more effectively allowed the client to tailor marketing strategies and product offerings, resulting in increased customer retention and boosting revenue.

Faster Decision-Making: With data availability reduced from 3-5 days to 24 hours or less, the client could respond more swiftly to market changes, improving agility and competitive edge.

Reduced Operational Cost: The modernized system not only lowered operational costs compared to the previous analytics system but also freed up resources to invest in other strategic initiatives, further driving business growth.