Retail company

Our goal is always to achieve a positive transformation of organisations to allow them to use their technological potential fully and to implement their business strategies. For a better understanding of the essence of our approach and our actions, here is a business case, which is a description of the job performed for one of our customers

Context

Enterprise

A large company present both online and offline. The Management Board believed for a long time that the most valuable data that the company possess - data on millions of its customers shopping in stationary and online stores - were not explored at all.

Changes accelerated after a visit to a retail trade show in New York, where many retailers presented business cases receiving above-average increases in sales through the analysis of customer behaviour.

A year ago, a Chief Data Officer was quickly recruited externally, who reported directly to the CEO and set up a Data Lab team consisting of 15 data scientists. The "Data Driven Organisation" bullet point was added to the company's strategy.

Issues

The company's basic operational reports, which had always been used, stopped being developed and are now increasingly unavailable.
The time that it takes from the moment a product enters the warehouse to the moment it can be sold online is getting increasingly longer due to incorrect product data.
In social media, customers are ironic about astronomical delivery costs of small products in the company's online store due to their wrong dimensions, which give the incorrect input for automatic transport calculation.
The company is unable to create new reports. The IT department refers to the Data Lab ("We have no resources.") and the Data Lab refers back to the IT department ("We are data science team, reporting is not our job.").
The cost of maintaining the Data Lab in the context of the COVID-19 uncertainty and the lack of measurable business results is becoming an increasingly heavier burden on the company.

Job done by Smart Topaz

Detected dysfunctions

The company did not have a document specifying the company's strategy in terms of the data area.
The only data-related operational documents concerned the referencing of Master Data products and were incomplete, while the process itself involved many people from different departments of the company with no clear division of duties.
There were no uniform business metrics for basic concepts such as margin, turnover, or stock.
Most of data sources were not documented.
Still, access to the cloud data platform of one of the key global market players was purchased and most of the organisation data were transferred there.

Detected additional dysfunctions

Two of the most talented BI programmers from the IT department joined the Data Lab team, receiving a 20% raise and the opportunity to learn a new programming language. The other two people responsible for the reports left the company, and the CIO did not obtain approval to replace them due to the costs incurred to establish the Data Lab.
Within two years, the Chief Data Officer together with his team created over a dozen use cases based on the company's data, which were at first favourably received by the Management Board. However, some Management Board members were unable to understand how Data Lab priorities were managed, and most of the use cases after the POC phase were never implemented in the production environment.

Actions taken

Beginning of cooperation

The agreement was signed following the meeting with the Management Board of the company and key people in the organisation. The agreement covered the examination of and improvement to the following areas:

Process efficiency
System Architecture
Software development governance
Business and technology partnership

After the first month

The results of the research on the efficiency of processes were presented. Based on these results, the following actions were taken:

A Master Data Product team (in the Purchasing Department) was divided into a team responsible for entering data into the systems (Referencing Team) and a team responsible for determining the method of measuring their quality (Quality Team).
A RACI matrix for the Master Data Product per each position in the company was approved.

After the second month

A description of the key processes in the Master Data Product was created, and the Quality Team published the first Master Data Product quality dashboard approved by the appropriate persons defined in the RACI matrix.
Uniform business metrics for basic concepts such as margin, turnover, or stock were defined.
Smart Topaz proposed a comprehensive organisational change in the digital area in the company, which was adopted by the Management Board. The role of the IT Director was redefined and its name was changed to Chief Digital Officer. The Chief Digital Officer was given responsibility for the organisation's technological framework and software development in each of the company's business areas, the so-called "platforms" (Finance and Controlling, Tender, Supply Chain, Customer).

This change was also associated with the transition from project management to product management of software development, and therefore the appointment of business leaders from the relevant departments of the company for each software area. The business leaders, remaining in their existing structures, were given responsibility for defining KPIs of products in their area and for managing the change resulting from the software developed.

After the third month

Smart Topaz offered to create a comprehensive data strategy for the organisation. The offer was submitted and approved.

After the fifth month

The Data Driven Organisation strategy was approved by the Management Board. It concerned the entire area of data governance, methodology of managing the technological data platform, and the method of creating data products. It also defined the minimum set of data roles in the company necessary to implement the strategy.