Data warehousing programme forms part of supermarket’s business transformation programme to boost efficiency, enhance business processes and cut costs

Data warehousing programme forms part of supermarket’s business transformation programme to boost efficiency, enhance business processes and cut costs

WM Morrisons, the UK’s fourth largest food retailer, is working with software and IT services provider Mastek to deliver a comprehensive business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW) capabilities across all areas of its business.

The programme integrates a number of existing legacy IT systems to give Morrisons a more accurate view of the information held in numerous data warehouses across its organisation. By adopting this integrated approach, the supermarket retailers aims to analyse all available data and identify market trends much more easily, so that it can make changes to business processes in a way that reduces costs, eliminates duplication of efforts, improves financial reporting and increases supplier competition.

Experience required for large-scale project

Mastek said Morrisons chose it to deliver this programme due to its experience of delivering large-scale BI/DW solutions and a flexible, collaborative approach. Due to Mastek’s successful delivery on the programme so far, Morrisons has now also announced the provider as its preferred supplier for all BI projects.

Adrian Stanbury, programme director at WM Morrisons, commented: “As part of our business transformation initiative, ‘Evolve,’ we needed to integrate a number of different data sources in order to gain a more holistic view of our organisation and ensure that real-time information is readily available to inform our business decisions.”

Keeping pace with evolving needs

He said that, from the outset, the Mastek team impressed with their understanding of Morrisons’ business requirements and helped create a data management strategy that made immediate improvements to processes, while also delivering measurable benefits back to the business.

“By bringing together our disparate IT systems, Mastek has made it much easier for us to share and analyse our most valuable business data, so that we can improve our market strategy and make changes that impact the bottom line,” he added. “Based on the success of this project, we have now chosen to work with Mastek on a wider range of BI/DW projects incorporating high level design, architecture, and testing.”

Mastek worked with Morrisons to develop an understanding of the company’s business operations, challenges, requirements and the processes that would need to be put in place to support the solution. Using this information, the provider said it was able to create a delivery methodology that enabled the BI/DW technology to be implemented in a way that met with the retailer’s business objectives, on time and within budget.