Morrisons, a leading UK-based supermarket chain, is modernizing its data infrastructure to support real-time insights and operational efficiency. By embracing advanced data integration capabilities, Morrisons is transitioning to a more agile, data-driven approach. This shift allows the company to optimize processes, enhance decision-making, and ultimately improve the overall customer experience across its stores and online platforms.
About Morrisons
Morrisons is one of the UK’s largest supermarket chains, with over 100 years of experience in the food retail industry. Proudly based in Yorkshire, it serves customers across the UK through a network of nearly 500 conveniently located supermarkets and various online home delivery channels. With a commitment to quality, Morrisons sources fresh produce directly from over 2,700 farmers and growers, ensuring customers receive the best products. Dedicated to sustainability and community engagement, Morrisons continually invests in innovative solutions to enhance operations and improve the shopping experience.
Challenge
Morrisons set out to modernize its data infrastructure to achieve five key goals:
- Elevating Customer Experience: Creating a better shopping experience for customers.
- Loading to Google Cloud: Transitioning to Google Cloud and leveraging Looker for enhanced reporting capabilities.
- Accessing Real-Time Data: Shifting from batch processing to real-time data access, enabling faster decision-making and improved operational efficiency.
- Enhancing Picking Efficiency: Morrisons sought to streamline their online picking process by improving stock visibility across depots and warehouses.
- Improving On-Shelf Availability: Ensuring products are consistently in stock and accessible to customers.
To meet these goals, the team needed to move away from their legacy Oracle Exadata data warehouse and strategically align on Google Cloud. This involved transitioning their data to Google BigQuery as the new centralized data warehouse, which required not only propagating data but also ensuring real-time access for better decision-making and operational efficiency. Moreover, prior to this transition, Morrisons never had a centralized repository of real-time data, and only ever had batch snapshots delivered from its disparate systems.
“Retail is real-time. We have our online shop open 24/7, and we have products moving around our distribution network every minute of every day. It’s really important that we have a real-time view of how our business is operating,” shares Peter Laflin, Chief Data Officer at Morrisons.
In order to accomplish this, Morrisons needed a tool that could connect their separate systems and seamlessly move data into Google Cloud. Striim was selected to ingest critical datasets, including the Retail Management System (RMS), which holds vast store transaction data and key reference tables, and the Warehouse Management Systems (WMS), which oversee operations across 14 distribution depots. The integration of these systems into BigQuery in real time provided critical visibility into product availability, stock levels, and core business metrics such as waste and shrinkage. Most importantly, Morrisons needed this mission-critical data delivered in real time.
“We’ve moved from a world where we have batch-processing to a world where, within two minutes, we know what we sold and where we sold it,” shares Laflin. “That empowers senior leaders, colleagues in stores, colleagues across our logistics and manufacturing sites to understand where we are as a business right now. Real-time data is not a nice to have, real-time data is an absolute essential to run a business the scale and size of ours.”
Morrisons sought to move away from their existing analytics suite and leverage Google Looker for their reporting and analytics needs. This meant they had to regenerate all existing reports that previously ran on the Exadata platform, aligning them with the new Google Cloud infrastructure. Striim played a critical role in centralizing their data in BigQuery and delivering it in real time, enabling Morrisons to power their reporting with fresh insights. This transformation is key to achieving their goal of a more agile, data-driven operation and supporting future business initiatives.
Solution
Morrisons now leverages Striim to connect disparate systems and ingest critical datasets from their Oracle databases into Google Cloud, using BigQuery as their new centralized data warehouse. They required a solution that could seamlessly load data from multiple sources while providing real-time access through BigQuery, and Striim provides this.
Striim plays a pivotal role in ingesting two core databases: the Retail Management System (RMS) and the Warehouse Management System (WMS). The RMS, a vast dataset containing store transaction tables and key reference data, requires efficient data transfer to minimize latency, and Striim ensures that this high volume of data is processed seamlessly.
Striim also ingests data from all 14 distribution depots, which are connected through 28 sources in the WMS. This integration provides real-time visibility into stock levels, enabling ‘live-pick’ decision-making by revealing what stock is available, where it is located, and at what time. Backed by real-time intelligence, this capability accelerates business processes that were previously reliant on periodic batch updates. As a result, Morrisons can optimize the replenishment process and ensure that shelves remain well-stocked, ultimately improving overall efficiency and increasing customer satisfaction.
Striim’s real-time data delivery powers Morrisons’ reporting transformation as they rebuild all reporting within Google Looker. By centralizing and accelerating the flow of data into BigQuery in real time, Striim enables faster, actionable insights that drive operational excellence and future business initiatives. “My team felt that Striim was the only tool that could deliver the requirements that we have,” shares Laflin.
Outcome
By leveraging Striim to transition from batch processing to real-time data access, Morrisons has significantly enhanced their ability to track and manage three critical key performance indicators (KPIs): availability, waste, and shrinkage. With access to faster, real-time insights, executives can more effectively identify risks and implement strategies to mitigate them, ultimately leading to improved operational decision-making and better performance across the organization. This shift allows Morrisons to optimize their processes and drive positive outcomes related to these key metrics.
“Without Striim, we couldn’t create the real-time data that we then use to run the business,” shares Laflin. “It’s a very fundamental part of our architecture.”
The move towards real-time data has allowed Morrisons to identify that their shelf availability has notably improved, ensuring that products are consistently in stock and accessible to customers. As a result, they are beginning to uncover the full range of benefits that this transformation can bring, including enhanced inventory management and reduced waste.
From the customer perspective, better shelf availability translates into happier shoppers, as they can find the products they want when they visit stores. This improvement not only fosters customer loyalty but also positions Morrisons to compete more effectively in the marketplace, ultimately driving growth and enhancing overall customer satisfaction.
