Frasers Group works to clear data bottleneck with self-service data analytics solution for non-engineers

Frasers Group started as a small store in Maidenhead in 1982 and grew to become a global retail powerhouse. They now represent a collection of the world’s most iconic brands including Sports Direct, House of Fraser, Frasers, FLANNELS, GAME, Jack Wills, Sofa.com, Evans Cycles, USC, and Everlast.

Business challenge

In the world of retail, data analytics is everything. Otherwise, there’s no way to know the customer. In this regard, Frasers Group is no different. After a series of acquisitions and rapid expansion in recent years, the retailer found themselves with a disparate technology stack and no usable systems to drive data and extract valuable insights. 

What systems that did exist were largely in the hands of the data engineering team and inaccessible to the product and customer marketing teams. With their hands full maintaining the data infrastructure, data engineering had no time to run analytics for the product and customer marketing teams, forming a significant bottleneck in the organisational workflow. What they really needed was a self-service solution for data analytics. 

Solution

Recognizing the immense potential of the cloud, Frasers Group made a crucial decision to partner with SADA and Google Cloud as their trusted suppliers to drive their cloud transformation journey. The initial focus was on establishing a strong Cloud and Data Foundation, and after six months of collaboration, SADA successfully assisted Frasers Group in migrating their first dataset to Google Cloud’s powerful BigQuery. Frasers Group’s existing on-premises Fivetran solution for change data capture played a pivotal role in seamlessly loading the dataset into BigQuery, enabling the adoption of a modern data warehouse approach. Today, SADA continues to provide a dedicated team of Cloud Engineering and Advisory experts, ensuring Frasers Group benefits from consistent strategic guidance and flexibility in their cloud journey.

Results

As a result of working with SADA, Frasers Group has been able to make significant progress towards their goal of implementing a self-service data analytics solution for their non-technical teams. The Cloud and Data foundation was successfully implemented as the initial step for moving their first dataset to BigQuery on Google Cloud. In the future, Frasers Group will be able to restructure their data to make it more accessible and scalable to unlock more value. Eventually, Frasers will have the ability to fix the veracity of their data as they build toward the ultimate objective of a self-service, value-driven data model.