Belgian DIY retailer: Accelerating data migration, processing and maintenance with Informatica Product360

A Belgian DIY retailer

Our client is a Belgian retailer focused on the Do-It-Yourself market.

The company was founded as a franchise organisation in the seventies. Over the next 50 years, it expanded with more than 150 separate stores spread over the country and >2000 employees. More than half of the stores are property of independent franchisers.

As of today, our client is one of the largest DIY players in the Belgian retail market. A typical franchisee sells around 25.000 items inside and around the house. In parallel with the brick-and-mortar stores, they are also in the process of building a webshop.

Hurdles to adoption and implementation of Informatica Product 360°

In order to make the strategic shift towards e-commerce, our client has also built a webshop. The migration of the article data to the digital realm turned out to be quite time-intensive.

To speed up the process of acquiring, processing and delivering data within their ecosystem, Informatica Product 360° was acquired.

There were a few challenges regarding the implementation of this tool and setting up the data processing. In addition, our client experienced an overload of strain and stress on the Master Data Management team.

Engagement

When first examining the challenges faced, the DTA team helped determine priorities by creating a roadmap and Data Strategy for the coming years.

Next, our team leveraged their knowledge of Informatica’s Product 360 by improving the processes needed to manage the program on three levels: Migration, Processing and Maintenance. In addition, we built several missing critical components in order to stabilize the platform.

We launched a strategy to connect the operational systems to the MDM installation, which provided the opportunity for further acceleration in terms of data migration. In parallel with and in support of the initial migration challenge, we started a pragmatic Data Governance initiative that would be scalable over time.

Results

The client now has the structural foundations to build a more efficient way of managing their data assets. Roles and responsibilities have been defined and rolled out within the project, allowing for more efficient collaboration.

Enabling the client with the means to migrate their legacy application faster will speed up their efforts in the future.

In summary, we enabled them to better fulfil its strategic objective of shifting towards an e-commerce business model.

Team

Pieter Hens – MDM & DQ Engagement Manager

Pieter focuses his expertise on unifying Master Data Management, Data Quality and Data Governance as an expert in Product 360 and Customer 360 MDM integrations, preferably using Informatica Products. He has 10 years of Master Data Management and Data Quality expertise from both a business as a hands-on technical expert in the data lifecycle.