About Woolworths Group

Woolworths Group is Australia and New Zealand’s largest food and everyday needs retailer with more than 1,400 stores.

It is also Australia’s largest private sector employer, with more than 180,000 employees spread across its stores, distribution centers and support offices, all aiming to deliver superior customer experiences.

Unlocking value from data 

Retailers are constantly looking for ways to unlock value from the data they have to gain a competitive edge.

Woolworths recognized the importance of data as an asset and the need to build an analytical mindset across the organization.  The retailer wanted to improve its data accuracy, speed, and availability to enable smarter, faster decision making in this fiercely competitive industry.

However, Woolworths' digital core was built on outdated legacy systems, with company data held in siloed warehouses, from where it was supporting mission-critical reporting and analytics functions. This was not viable in the Business 4.0TM era and coupled with the challenges of higher operational and maintenance costs, the need for an agile and scalable data platform was clear. 

To continue to meet the expectations of its people and customers, Woolworths needed to enable a common source of truth that could serve trusted, reliable data with real-time data integration across its value chain. This would deliver digital transformation and long-term scalability across its business.

Enabling transformation 

Embracing data-driven retail for improved decision making and enhanced shopping experiences.

To grow and transform its data capabilities and meet the future needs of the business, Woolworths chose TCS as a strategic partner. Building on a 20-year partnership based on shared values and beliefs, the two companies embarked on a scalable cloud transformation, using an incremental and agile strategy. They collaborated to forge a roadmap for realizing a connected, reliable, and AI-driven retail experience, capitalizing on the power of Google Cloud as the unifying fabric.

TCS partnered with Woolworths to establish the foundations of a common data platform and onboard key company data from its sales, finance, and supply chain business units. The platform enabled a company-wide data lake as a single source of truth with self-service analytics, empowering employees across business units to create new value.

All data is now contained in a modern, scalable environment to inform stakeholders on everything from pricing and shelf usage to delivery management and staffing requirements. As a result, granular insights into challenges and opportunities are available in a much quicker and more cost-effective environment. 

“TCS helped us build a central data capability, leveraging the power of Google Cloud, to empower our business to make quicker decisions based on insights and evidence,” said John Hunt, CIO and Director of Group Enablement for Woolworths Group.  

With 90% of the company-wide data now onboarded onto Google Cloud, Woolworths has realized immense value in terms of on-demand availability of information, self-service analytics, as well as descriptive and prescriptive analytics, including the ability to leverage advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

Moving to Google Cloud has enabled a significant reduction in time to market, aligning with the agile demands of the business. As a result of the transformation, self-service analytics are three times faster, and advanced analytics use cases can be completed in a third of the time taken earlier. Disaster recovery time has also been drastically reduced from five days to just two hours.

Enhancing CX with AI

This foundational program has further enabled Woolworths to embark on a data-driven, decision-making journey.

With its data migrated to Google Cloud, Woolworths can now localize its range of products and adjust its pricing within stores based on customer groups; improve performance across the supply chain; better predict seasonal sales patterns; and meet its sustainability goals. All this makes for a more seamless, enhanced employee and customer shopping experience, giving Woolworths the desired competitive edge in a fast-evolving retail environment.