Prerequisite: None
Canadian Tire is one of the largest retailers in Canada operating in automotive, hardware, sports, leisure, and housewares sectors. The organization has seen steady growth across multiple banners through increased and diversified assortment. As the organization grew, so did the data volumes and complexity of analysis needed to run the business. However by 2020, these were exceeding our capabilities, and our growing staff of analysts could not meet the increasing demands for data-driven insights coming from throughout the organization.
The organization had to pivot to a self-service environment rather than the traditional route of reports/dashboards built by business analysts. The key to enabling 4,500 employees throughout such a vast organization was to establish a clear strategy for phasing out the plethora of ad hoc solutions that were previously relied on throughout the business. Core components of the strategy included a strong relationship between business and IT, creation of data marts in an analytical layer over raw data sets, internally marketing the solution to drive adoption, and a focus on educating business users.
Today, over 4,500 users are empowered to work directly with business data, spotting trends, managing inventory, and responding to increases in demand. At the same time, merchants and analysts have been able to focus on proactively driving opportunities and growth in the areas that may not have a lot of marketing support. Recently, Q4 2020 and FY 2020 Canadian Tire results were posted, showcasing how the organization persevered throughout the 2020 pandemic, maintained its brand, and ensured safe inventory position for the individual franchise stores.
In today’s talk, we dive into the complexities of analysis, details around the adoption strategy for the self-service environment, and Canadian Tire’s overall strategy when it comes to data.