Iceland Foods is a British food retailer with over 900 supermarkets throughout the UK, a further 40 owned or franchised stores across Europe, and a global export business. Iceland is one of Britain’s fastest-growing and most innovative retailers, recognised as one of the best companies to work for in the UK.
Business Challenge
Iceland Foods’ proprietary data platform was coming to its end-of-life, and the business sought a new solution that would allow them to to modernise their data estate. Iceland need a data solution that would allow them to extract meaningful insights more easily from their data, and ultimately enable them to benefit from the latest machine learning and AI technologies.
Solution:
Iceland Foods adopted Azure Synapse as their new modern data warehouse, introducing high availability and disaster recovery, while providing a user-friendly solution built on familiar Microsoft technology.
Results
The new data platform has facilitated easy access to information for business leaders, simplified data ingestion from additional sources, and streamlined recruitment, onboarding, and training processes at Iceland Foods. The data migration has also led to significant cost reductions, allowing the business to transition from a capital expenditure model to an operational expenditure model.
Using familiar technology has enabled key business leaders to access information with greater ease and allowed them to easily ingest additional data sources to augment their existing data. In turn, this ease-of-use has made recruitment easier for Iceland Foods, as there are less technical skills required by staff to access and analyse the information. This also means that onboarding staff and providing training is a quicker and smoother process.
The data itself, the most important component, has proven to be as robust and reliable as it was before the migration. And following the migration, Iceland have been able to benefit from greater opportunities to use their data, due to the intelligent functionality of Azure Synapse. The new solution is also scalable and can adapt to meet the requirements of peak trading times including Christmas. With the former estate retired, the Azure data estate aligns with Iceland Foods’ broader business plan of cloud migration.
The migration to Azure Synapse has also resulted in significantly reduced operational costs. The modern data warehouse has transformed Iceland Foods from an expensive capital expenditure model to a cost-effective operational expenditure model.
The next step for Iceland Foods is to explore the machine learning possibilities available to them. The team aspire to use AI to enable staff to conduct sophisticated data analysis.