Sainsbury’s democratized data and analytics to streamline operations across its 1,400+ stores

Sainsbury's adopted a holistic acquisition and consolidation strategy to address the rapid modernization of the retail marketplace, maintain its leadership position, and adapt to evolving customer expectations around the shopping experience. Its various brands leveraged dozens of disparate systems and hundreds of siloed analytics solutions—resulting in accuracy and consistency challenges.

Sainsbury's boldly embraced change and implemented a unified data and analytics (D&A) strategy to establish a trusted data fabric fit to serve its entire organization. At the nexus of its D&A ecosystem, it leveraged MicroStrategy to build a scalable and governed data model and deliver robust reporting requirements. Ultimately, Sainsbury's deployed a comprehensive suite of applications that deliver best-in-class analytics experiences to 12,000+ colleagues across its business, powered solely by Snowflake, AWS, and the MicroStrategy Cloud.

Today, colleagues across Sainsbury's leverage over 30 custom analytics applications to drive everyday decision-making on the store floor, across corporate functions, in the C-suite, and beyond—all deployed with a single cloud analytics platform.

Adopting a bold strategy helped Sainsbury's rethink its approach to data democratization—resulting in broad analytics adoption for everyday decision-making across its enterprise.

As a leading retailer, Sainsbury's has traditionally embraced change and evolving technology. This is no surprise for an organization that recently celebrated its 150th birthday. With a rapidly evolving market landscape in an industry that demands daily decision-making and streamlined processes, Sainsbury's knew that it needed to make bold moves to stay on the cutting edge.

The strategic approach Sainsbury’s took, represented in its ASPIRE initiative, is a textbook success story about how visionary leadership and goalsetting can quickly transform an organization. Sainsbury’s reimagined its business model, democratized its data, and operationalized analytics— empowering its colleagues to use trusted insights to make informed business decisions and work smarter each day.

Through ASPIRE, Sainsbury's sought to facilitate its digital transformation by establishing a unified data fabric for its organization with as few technologies as possible, relying on a select few best-in-breed cloud data and analytics (D&A) technologies to make access as "ubiquitous and easy as breathing oxygen" across its organization. Its simplified yet powerful solution stack leverages the MicroStrategy Cloud at its foundation, which is supported by an underlying AWS infrastructure packaged directly into the solution. The powerful semantic graph offered by MicroStrategy centrally stores and manages Snowflake data with a high degree of customizable governance to ensure that information leveraged by each colleague, no matter their role or location, is the right data needed to inform the best possible business decisions based on Sainsbury's single version of the truth.

Initially launching a completely reimagined and fully optimized mobile app for store operations, Sainsbury's took bold strokes to ensure its store-based colleagues and regional managers had the insights needed to make real-time decisions that help improve sales, reduce waste, and minimize shrink due to inventory loss—ultimately achieving high user adoption and exceeding 150,000 views each week for this application alone. Building on the success of its store reports app, Sainsbury's migrated more data to Snowflake and adopted an agile development model that allowed it to continuously roll out new analytics apps and enhancements designed to serve the unique needs of 12,000+ users.

Sainsbury’s embraces a cloud-first strategy toward corporate technology investment. Its enterprise analytics solution needed to seamlessly integrate with its preferred cloud data vendor, maintain superior security, and easily scale to serve thousands of users.

The Sainsbury’s team chose the MicroStrategy Cloud, connected to Snowflake data stores, as the best-fit foundation for its enterprise D&A mission based on a comprehensive list of selection criteria.

• Optimized Architecture with Best-in-Breed Technologies
• Ability to Establish a Unified and Trusted Data Model
• Rapid Enhancement Deployment at Enterprise Scale
• Streamlined Geospatial Mapping Integrations
  
• Best-in-Class Mobile Analytics Capabilities
• Compliance-Ready with Robust Data Security
• Deliver Job-Relevant Data from the CEO to the Shop Floor

Today, Sainsbury's leverages a custom suite of 30+ MicroStrategy apps to enable analytics use cases across all aspects of its business, spanning go-to-market strategy and execution, competitive pricing and positioning, buying and merchandising, supply chain management, store operations, and a variety of corporate functions. It even helped Sainsbury's rapidly react and effectively respond to complex challenges presented by the global pandemic.

Embracing a simplified D&A architecture, powered by best-in-breed cloud technologies, Sainsbury's unified its data fabric—and instilled a data-driven culture across its enterprise.

One of Europe's earliest enterprise-wide adopters of cloud-based D&A technologies, Sainsbury's recognized that delivering unified information across its business could have a transformative impact while helping it deliver the best value to customers.

Sainsbury's sought out a single analytics platform to complement a single cloud data warehouse for its technology stack, confident that the best technical solution for engraining D&A in its everyday business processes and enabling its people would result from a simplified but powerful architecture comprised of select best-in-breed solutions. Dissatisfied with its legacy on-premises DWHs, Sainsbury's determined that MicroStrategy could best integrate with its preferred cloud DWH for the future and deliver on the myriad of analytical needs of the thousands of users it planned to serve across its business. MicroStrategy, with its long history as a key analytics partner in certain aspects of Sainsbury's business, partnered with Snowflake on a 1-day technical proof-of-concept leveraging retail finance data. This POC demonstrated the superior performance, security, and scalability MicroStrategy delivers, further providing Sainsbury's the confidence it needed to make the bold decision and adopt an entirely new centralized, cloud-powered D&A architecture.

Furthermore, MicroStrategy demonstrated how its enterprise semantic layer offered superior data governance and performance at scale, helping Sainsbury's develop and deploy an entirely new way of empowering store colleagues with on-the-go analytics with Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and company-issued mobile devices. Ultimately, MicroStrategy became the sole analytics solution for facilitating its enterprise D&A vision: helping Sainsbury's modernize its solution suite, expand trusted analytics to 12,000+ users across its organization, and increase employee engagement and customer satisfaction—all by setting itself apart with a pervasive culture of data.

Management teams across all stores leverage daily KPIs and overall trends to inform and manage store operations using a mobile app.

Sainsbury's colleagues across all 1,400+ stores rely on this store-centric operational reporting app to access powerful business performance insights everyday—enabling managers to make real-time product, merchandising, and staffing decisions directly from the store floor.

This apps allows store and category managers to monitor, manage, and actively address critical retail KPls in near real-time by providing managers with aggregate and drill-down views of performance metrics spanning product and category inventory, sales, turnover, budgeting, revenue, and other indicators that help direct colleague actions to improve the retail shopping experience for customers. Furthermore, by embracing agile development practices, Sainsbury's regularly releases new Dossier chapters as app enhancements designed to help store colleagues align their activities to achieve goals related with corporate initiatives.

Built with a modular approach, this dynamic solution also features context-sensitive links that connect an array of dashboards together into one seamless experience. In addition to providing insights into topline KPls, this also allows business users to view new chapters and reports published to support tactical initiatives—strategic focus areas that store colleagues focus on for designated time periods to affect a specific customer experience change, enhancement, or new service.

The shopper sentiment app analyses and aggregates near real-time customer experience data to surface insights with a custom Natural Language Query (NLQ) text search widget.

Gaining near real-time insights into the experience of its shoppers is a critical pillar for helping Sainsbury's achieve its strategic goal of being a place where people love to work and shop. That's why it leverages Nectar, its loyalty points program, to incentivize customers to share feedback that it can integrate into decision-making.

Through Lettuce Know, one of Sainsbury's key customer feedback initiatives that offers bonus Nectar points to participants, shoppers submit information about their recent shopping experiences online using unique identifiers printed on each receipt. Sainsbury's then leverages a Python-enriched ETL process to aggregate and tag this data in Snowflake, which is in turn organized and visualized for user analysis in MicroStrategy.

Analysts leverage this application, which features a custom text-based search widget with NLQ functionality, to examine customer feedback, identify trends, drill-down on key findings, and share near real-time recommendations for improving the customer shopping experience with store managers.

Sainsbury's rapidly developed and deployed a sophisticated solution to align its staffing, supply chain, and operations to continue feeding the nation despite the unique challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Leveraging the unified data fabric it established across its business, Sainsbury's rapidly innovated to meet the complex needs of the COVID-19 pandemic—using its robust D&A strategy to best serve and protect colleagues and customers.

In early 2020, businesses worldwide rapidly reacted to the myriad of challenges presented by the emerging public health crisis. Relying on its agile D&A operating model to do so, Sainsbury's rapidly innovated to help it grapple with store operations interruptions, supply chain shortages, staffing challenges, public health concerns, and other complexities. Within just one week, Sainsbury's piloted a new analytics app that helped its store and regional leadership allocate resources to address staffing and supply chain shortages. Within two weeks, it had developed enhancements based on store feedback from its pilot group, and deployed a comprehensive app to colleagues across every store. This app enabled users to overcome a variety of challenges during the lockdown and subsequent stages of the pandemic response, including identifying optimal adjustments to store hours to address shifted customer shopping patterns, prioritizing shipping and stocking of essential supplies, using geospatial analyses to redeploy colleagues while minimizing travel requirements, operating store hours designated for vulnerable customers and National Health Service (NHS) workers, and much more.

Sainsbury's leverages 30+ custom applications to support its go-to-market strategy and execution, store operations, and corporate functions.

Beyond store management KPls, Sainsbury's also assesses the customer experience and its impact on satisfaction for its various in-store and online offerings. These include using personal mobile devices for self-scan shopping and efficiently fulfilling 850K+ online orders per week with optimized scheduling solutions and order accuracy apps that help in-store "pickers" fulfill orders effectively.

From a strategic perspective, Sainsbury's uses an array of MicroStrategy apps to help define its price positioning, buying, and merchandising approach, and facilitate its go-to-market execution across these and other key corporate priorities. These apps also support a range of core business functions like HR, Operations, Buying, Merchandising, and Customer Loyalty—and even offer unique solutions aligned to industry initiatives and corporate values, such as enabling Sainsbury's to monitor and manage agricultural welfare.

By resisting the urge to lift-and-shift, the Sainsbury's team successfully established a unified D&A landscape for use everywhere across its business. Sainsbury's built this trusted and governed data fabric on a powerful yet simplified infrastructure—establishing an enterprise-grade foundation fit for long-term success. "Our ASPIRE initiative has truly transformed Sainsbury's—and the combined power of Snowflake, AWS, and MicroStrategy have proven to be a key driver of that transformation," said Hunter.

Visit microstrategy.com/sainsburys to learn more about Sainsbury's award-winning enterprise analytics journey, powered by Snowflake, AWS, and MicroStrategy.