How a British Multinational Retailer Built a Modern Data and Insights Platform for High‑Growth Retail

Learn how a major British multinational retailer, known for its premium food halls and clothing & home ranges, partnered with Nihilent to build a modern data and insights platform on Snowflake - creating a single source of truth that powers pricing, promotions, merchandising and inventory decisions across channels.

Service

Data & Analytics, Cloud Data Platforms, and Snowflake

Vertical

Retail (Food, Clothing & Home)

Region

Global (United Kingdom, International Stores, Online Channels)

Tech Stack

Snowflake, AWS Glue, Amazon S3, AWS Lake Formation, Tableau, SAP, Salesforce, OMS, POS and Loyalty Systems

How a British Multinational Retailer Built a Modern Data and Insights Platform for High‑Growth Retail

Client Overview

The client is a long‑established British retailer with a nationwide store estate and a growing online presence, offering clothing, home products and premium food to customers in the UK and international markets. Its brand is strongly associated with quality, trusted food ranges and curated clothing collections, delivered through an omnichannel model that integrates stores, click‑and‑collect and digital experiences.

As the retailer executed a high‑growth strategy, leadership needed a single business view across channels, categories and locations to support decisions on assortment, pricing, promotions and inventory. However, data was dispersed across core systems such as SAP, Salesforce, order management, POS, loyalty, supply chain and partner platforms – making it difficult to create a single source of truth for commercial and operations teams.

Business Challenges

The client wanted to design and implement a modern data platform that would enable global and cross‑channel use cases, promote a data‑driven culture and drive measurable business outcomes, but faced several challenges.

Federated Channels and Systems

Multiple channels and systems produced inconsistent views of sales, stock and demand across stores and online.

Fragmented Insights for Merchandising and Planning

Disconnected data restricted category, assortment and merchandising teams from using unified insights for planning decisions.

Limited Support for Promotion and Price Optimization

Pricing and promotion decisions relied on partial data, limiting ability to respond quickly to competitors.

Need for Scalable, Cost-Efficient Data Platform

Leadership required a secure, scalable platform delivering single‑source access for diverse decision makers at lower cost.

How Nihilent Addressed This

Nihilent partnered with the retailer to design and implement a modern data and insights platform that could serve as the backbone for high‑growth, omnichannel retail operations. The solution focused on building a cloud‑based data lake, standardizing data across channels and automating core merchandising and planning models on top of Snowflake and AWS.

Cloud‑Based Modern Data Lake

Nihilent built a consolidated central data lake on Snowflake, orchestrated with AWS Glue, S3 and AWS Lake Formation, to ingest and harmonize data from SAP, Salesforce, order management, POS, loyalty, fulfillment, walk‑in meters, third‑party logistics and other core systems.

Common Data Model Across Channels

A common data model was established across sales channels and source systems, aligning product, store, customer, inventory and transaction entities to create a single business view and the building blocks for a Customer360 capability.

Automation of Merchandising and Planning Model

Nihilent implemented an automated merchandising and planning model leveraging data from item master, inventory snapshots, SAP‑posted actual sales, sales summaries at day level, in‑transit inventory, stock transfers and open orders - enabling more accurate demand understanding and inventory allocation.

Enterprise BI Platform for Commercial Teams

On top of the data lake, Nihilent delivered an enterprise BI platform using Tableau, providing ready‑to‑use insights for promotions, assortment planning, merchandising, inventory, discounts, product placement, location‑specific offers and marketing campaigns.

Key Results & Outcomes

Single, Trusted Business View

Management now accesses unified views of sales, inventory and margins across channels, regions and product categories.

Faster, Data-Led Commercial Decisions

Commercial teams use timely insights to plan events, adjust stock and respond quickly to demand shifts.

Optimized Merchandising and Assortment Planning

Merchandising and planning models use consolidated data to improve availability, reduce stockouts and limit overbuying risk.

Stronger Promotion and Pricing Performance

Pricing and promotion decisions draw on cross‑channel elasticity, discount and uplift data to protect profitability.

Foundation For Customer-Centric Retailing

The modern data lake and BI platform provide building blocks for richer customer understanding and personalization.

Key Takeaways

For a heritage retailer balancing food, clothing and home categories, the real transformation lay in moving from fragmented reporting to a modern data and insights platform that supports high‑growth ambitions. By consolidating diverse data sources into a Snowflake‑based data lake, standardizing models across channels and automating merchandising and planning, the client now runs its business on a single, trusted version of the truth.

This foundation enables more confident decisions on assortment, pricing, promotions and inventory, while opening pathways to advanced analytics and customer‑centric experiences that match the expectations of today’s omnichannel shoppers.

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