Inside Our Evolving Data Strategy at Coles

A good data strategy ensures that the data is of high quality, and hosted together in one place with appropriate security and controls.

But in terms of making a data strategy successful – i.e. achieving the goals of obtaining all that data in the first place – it’s important to understand the criteria of a solid data strategy: transparency, scalability and accessibility.

All of this is underpinned by people, processes and technology.

Firstly, no data strategy can come to fruition without the right people in place. They must be data literate. Then you need to have the right application or systems in place to be able to host that data. There are so many data tools on the market, but the key is to use tools your people are conversant with.

The third component is around processes, because hosting that data comes with its own challenges and privileges. You need to make sure the data is properly governed and that you are fully compliant.

These are the foundations of our data strategy at Coles.

Taking the guesswork out of the customer experience

At Coles, the core of our overall digital strategy is to create better customer experiences for the 21 million customers who shop with us each week, so our data is being used for exactly that. While we used to monitor everything and capture data more from a sales standpoint, we’re now focusing our attention on our customers’ behaviour so we can provide the right experiences at the right times. One of our values is ‘Customer Obsession’, and it’s clear that data is becoming a great enabler in helping us to better understand and act upon the diverse needs of our customer base.

A few years back, we would often make decisions based on gut feeling: it’s summer, for example, so we should sell ice cream. Now those decisions are based on facts and trends. Our captured data tells us what was popular last year and what customers responded to last week, or if we should put on another promotion because the last one had a big effect.

What this boils down to is examining how we can make better decisions based on our business intelligence – being proactive instead of reactive by understanding customer patterns and anticipating future needs.

My team’s role

My team and I contribute to every aspect of the people, processes and technologies required to foster a data-driven culture.

One of our roles is to make all employees tool literate, so we teach them to become experts on BI tools and platforms, like MicroStrategy, PowerBI and Snowflake. Our aim is to enable everyone to utilise our Business intelligence within their function in the business. We also educate everybody on data governance: what PI data is, what PCI compliance entails, what you can and cannot do, what is internal, public, restricted and so forth. It’s essential to understand these things.

Additionally, my team plays a key role in migrating assets from the Oracle environment into the Microsoft Cloud environment, so we help integrate our data strategy into the company’s wider technology strategy.

Never a dull moment!

I have been at Coles for close to 13 years now in different roles, and in the data team for more than half that time. It’s amazing to look back at the journey we’ve had, where we started with domes sitting in our data centre hosting gigabytes of data, then terabytes, and now Oracle Exadata appliances containing petabytes of data.

As a retailer, the data we capture is a lot larger than many other industries. It’s really exciting being in a company going through such rapid and impactful data transformation, especially with continued online sales revenue growth, increased capacity in Click&Collect and our journey towards automating our DC (Distribution Centres) of the future meaning we’ll have even more data at our disposal. Now more than ever I can see the tangible impact my work has on people in the community who shop at Coles.

Our data centres today have huge Oracle machines holding our data, and we’re going to be moving it all over onto the cloud platform. This means we’re going to have a lot of positions opening up for people who are experienced with technical data platform transformation, so it’s a good time to think about joining us!