DATA HELPS KESKO DELIVER ON ITS PROMISE “FOR SHOPPING TO BE FUN”

With the help of Agile Data Engine, Kesko is able to quickly and efficiently develop data solutions, improve data quality and enhance business agility.

Kesko, a Finnish trading sector pioneer, is using data and digital services to create added value for customers and profitable growth for Kesko and K Group's stores and partners.

Through its data-driven approach, Kesko is able to deliver on its promise of "For shopping to be fun" by creating a personalized customer experience across physical and online channels.

By 2025, Kesko aims to double its data utilization rate to 50% through the use of a modern data platform and a cross-functional DataOps team. This has allowed the company to speed up data development, improve data quality, and unlock new business opportunities.

Data is at the heart of Kesko's operations and drives its strategy towards digitalization and enhanced customer experience. The company is leveraging the power of data, analytics, and artificial intelligence to support its operations and drive profitable growth for K Group’s stores and partners. Kesko's data-driven approach has been integrated into its store operations, allowing it to support K-retailers in creating personalized, store-specific business ideas based on customer data. Through data and digital services, Kesko and K Group is able to create real value for their customers and drive profitable growth.

Data helps Kesko deliver on its promise “For shopping to be fun.” By leveraging the insights gained from customer data, Kesko can create a personalized and engaging shopping experience for customers in physical and online stores, and digitally in various channels.

Kesko's strong focus on customer data allows them to constantly surprise and delight their customers. The company's success in the grocery trade, in particular, is a direct result of its use of customer data to create store-specific business ideas and improve the store, selection, and marketing management.

With the help of their new data platform and cross-functional DataOps team, Kesko is turning months to weeks and weeks to days in data development. As a result, data and analytics users are seeing changes delivered fast and without disrupting the availability of the solutions.

The new data platform and cross-functional DataOps team not only improve the speed of data development, but also enhance the data quality. The data platform can refresh the data every few minutes, ensuring that retailers and other data consumers always have access to up-to-date, reliable, and accurate data. This enables K-retailers to make informed decisions based on the most current information, improving the overall quality of their data and reports.

The true agility of the DataOps team and the data platform’s scalability enables this new business agility. Agile Data Engine is the heart of the solution that makes the day-to-day development and operation of the data platform easier for the DataOps team.

BUILDING THE MODERN DATA PLATFORM

Kesko’s goal is to double their data utilisation rate by 2025 from 25% to 50%. Kesko knows their data had enormous potential to unlock new business opportunities.  To turn that potential into reality, Kesko needed to provide access to that data for a wider audience within the company, not just the heavy-users of data. The overall data architecture needed to be modernized to serve the changing needs of business better.

When Kesko was planning the new data platform development, they knew what they were getting into. Experience had shown that simply changing the technology wouldn’t be enough to reach the level of agility and speed they were after. Instead, Kesko needed to reimagine how to work as an organization to solve business needs with data. 

The decisions made on the data platform architecture, technology and ways of working make it possible for everyone to work towards creating value in a consistent and agile way while sharing best practices with each other. This, in turn, has enabled a leap in productivity and alignment.

Tuomas Autio

IT Director Data Platforms & Technology, Kesko

RETHINKING THE WAY A DATA PLATFORM IS DEVELOPED

Adopting the DataOps mindset and working as a cross-functional team has been crucial to Kesko's success. However, considering the entire life-cycle of the data platform and thinking about its scalability and operability from day one has been equally important.

Combining speed and agility with robust scalability is a challenging task. Kesko knew that building a scalable platform from scratch would require significant time and effort, with at least six months needed to build the underlying infrastructure before the platform could be used to solve actual business cases.

To overcome this challenge, Kesko selected Agile Data Engine as their DataOps platform. Agile Data Engine provides data modeling, transformation design, continuous deployment, workflow orchestration, and monitoring from the outset, balancing automation and flexibility for users. By using Agile Data Engine, Kesko is able to quickly and easily develop and operate their enterprise data repository, enabling them to reap the benefits of a scalable, agile data platform.

Agile Data Engine’s metadata approach to data modeling and workload orchestration means that everyone in the DataOps teams understands how the solution does what it does. So even if the team members change over time, we can be sure that any change to the platform will not disrupt the daily work of our data consumers.

Mikko Ollila

Head of Data Platforms, Kesko

“As a data engineer, it is important to know that the underlying infrastructure is updated automatically with Agile Data Engine SaaS. As a result, I can spend my time understanding the business needs and processes driving the solution I’m developing. I don’t have to worry that anyone deploying changes through the CI/CD pipeline would break anything in the production environment”, says Nakul Bansal, Senior Data Engineer, Kesko. 

Kesko’s goal is to work iteratively and keep expanding the data platform according to the needs of the broader audience of data consumers.

“One of the most important reasons we chose Agile Data Engine was the ability to slice the data platform development work vertically, based on business cases. In practice, we can significantly reduce complexity and speed up the work by focusing on a single use case. But instead of a custom-built point solution, the team delivers future-proof and scalable work, fitting well into the overall architecture and business processes.” says Tuomas Autio. 

Key takeaways

Kesko is using data and digital services to create added value for customers and profitable growth for K-retailers and other partners.

Through its data-driven approach, Kesko is able to deliver on its promise of "For shopping to be fun" by creating a personalized customer experience across physical and online channels.

By 2025, Kesko aims to double its data utilization rate to 50% through the use of a modern data platform and a cross-functional DataOps team.

The new data platform and DataOps team allow Kesko to speed up data development, improve data quality, and unlock new business opportunities.

Agile Data Engine is an essential part of the solution, making it easier for the DataOps team to manage the development and operation of the data platform.

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