The central data team at Albert Heijn (AH) Technology is collaborating with Xomnia to advance its way of working, and enhance its data architecture and all the other functionalities of its data platform.
A Xomnia team composed of an analytics translator and data engineers joined AH Technology’s central data team, providing both strategic and tactical consultations, in addition to continuing and improving daily engineering operations.
This on-going collaboration contributed to growing AH Technology’s data platform and to increasing its maturity. This was done by introducing new testing approaches, improving data quality through automatic data checks, onboarding new datasets, and enabling new analytics use cases, among others.
“We worked with different consultants from Xomnia, who have shown craftsmanship in their work, depth in their knowledge, clarity in communication and love for a challenge.” - A Product Owner at Albert Heijn
Challenge
Albert Heijn Technology is the division focused on innovation in retail within the Dutch supermarket chain giant Albert Heijn. It also closely collaborates with retail chains Etos and Gall & Gall.
Albert Heijn’s central data organization is responsible for making operational data available for analytical purposes. Source systems send this data to a central data platform, which serves data scientists, machine learning engineers and data analysts in doing their work. The data platform handles terabytes of data driving a plethora of analytics use cases, ranging from store transactions, stock levels, product information, delivery trucks for online orders, to many others.
This data platform, however, needed to be replaced by a newer one, while it continues to supply analysts and data scientists with (new) data sources. To carry out this process, a team within AH Technology needed a product owner, engineering capacity and a technological lead to help them lead, design and implement their new version of their data platform.
Solution
Xomnia provided an analytics translator (as a product owner), data engineers and tech leads. They provided the client’s Head of Tech strategic consultations, and its data architects tactical consultations. Our team was also in charge of the continuation of daily engineering operations.
Some of the in-progress features the Xomnia team started working on include:
- Data Catalogue: A tool that helps all data professionals across the enterprise to quickly find the most appropriate data they need.
- Data Marts: Tooling and queries to standardize the creation of datasets ready to be consumed by analysts.
- Data Quality Checks: Checking datasets on factors such as accuracy, completeness, consistency, and reliability,
- Data Observability: Tooling to monitor and automatically alert teams about data quality issues before end users notice them.
Additionally, the team collaborated with business stakeholders to develop standardized KPIs that can be used by multiple end users, eliminating the requirement for duplicate data sets across departments, and providing a consistent view of metrics.
Impact
The collaboration between Albert Heijn Technology and Xomnia resulted in significant improvements to their data platform, making it more efficient, effective, and user-friendly. It also helped streamline processes and make data more accessible to analysts and data scientists. Consequently, this enabled stakeholders to make more informed decisions based on accurate and reliable data.
Xomnia's team also provided help to address challenges related to integrating data from source applications to the analytical platform. Moreover, they facilitated the processes by which analytics teams got the data they need, solved data quality issues, migrated data and data pipelines to newer technologies, among others.