Majid Al Futtaim embraces insights driven future with Microsoft Intelligent Data

Rapid growth through customer focus

With a commitment to create “great moments for everyone, every day,” Majid Al Futtaim Retail enables its customers to shop smarter and live better. For nearly 30 years, since the introduction of Carrefour to the UAE in 1995, Majid Al Futtaim Retail has grown significantly in line with its customers. Currently operating more than 460 stores, it serves over 770,000 customers daily and employs more than 37,000 people. The company aspires to build on this and become the most valued, trusted and innovative retailer, serving customers whenever, wherever, and however they choose.

The key to the growth of Carrefour, according to Rahul Bhandari, Chief Financial Officer of Majid Al Futtaim Retail, is innovating at every step of the customer experience. Catering to a diverse customer base across the 16 markets it serves, Majid Al Futtaim’s Carrefour continues to develop innovative omnichannel experiences by analyzing customer shopping insights and anticipating their preferences. Recently, the grocery retailer has introduced a variety of in-store and online solutions to meet the expectations of increasingly omnichannel consumers, including Face Pay, Mobile Scan & Go, CarrefourNOW express service and Click & Collect, all serving to increase convenience during the shopping journey. As part of the Carrefour customer experience, customers can discover the origins of the foods they choose and see the farm to store journey with an app on their phones. Bhandari also points to the company’s introduction of Carrefour retail hypermarkets (also known as superstores) to the Middle East, to deliver one-stop convenience to customers. 

By curating such innovative customer experiences, Majid Al Futtaim Retail’s business was growing fast, especially when it came to customer analytics. The company’s omnichannel strategy was attracting more customers across a growing range of regional markets. With such a vast and diverse customer base, Majid Al Futtaim Retail needed a solution to uncover more powerful customer insights and translate these into action.

“We had limited business performance insights scattered across three BI platforms, inconsistent KPIs methodologies for each business sector, and no on-the-go access to analytics or insights for our traveling executives,” says Mohamed Tawfiq, Director of Financial Planning and Analysis at Majid Al Futtaim Retail. “Performance insights and reports often were not generated at the business pace to inform timely decisions.”

Less data-chasing, more customer insight

To overcome these challenges, Bhandari, Tawfiq, and their colleagues decided to move Majid Al Futtaim Retail’s IT from an on-premises legacy infrastructure to a solution based on the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform. At the core of that platform is Azure Synapse Analytics for real-time analytics and Microsoft Power BI for highly intuitive dashboards.

Raw data is ingested into an Azure Data Lake via Azure Synapse Pipelines. Pipelines help schedule and manage ingestion rates. SQL pools and Spark pools are used to prep data for visualization and necessary workloads. Once data is cleaned and prepped, it is sent to Power BI for data visualization and self-service reporting. Azure Active Directory, Azure KeyVault, and Microsoft Purview are also used for access management, encrypted key storage, and data governance, respectively. 

“We were attracted to the breadth of the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform solutions, which interoperate fully with the rest of our Microsoft ecosystem, including Outlook, Teams, and the rest of Microsoft 365,” says Bhandari. “We use Microsoft to take advantage of real-time reporting, accessible dashboards so executives and managers see consistent data and insights wherever they are, and a full governance framework to keep data secure. We spend less time chasing down data and more time using the insights we get from that data.”

Bhandari says they began to see the benefits of choosing Microsoft even before the solution went into production at Carrefour. With the interoperability of the Intelligent Data Platform with the company’s existing technology ecosystem and its low/no code applications, designing and implementing the solution took just five months, compared to the 18 months the team had estimated it would take to develop a different BI solution.

“We developed and deployed our Microsoft solution fully in-house utilizing Majid Al Futtaim’s next-gen Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) team which was able to switch hats easily between being Data Engineers and Finance Personnel,” says Tawfiq. “We didn’t need outside consultants, integrators, or the lengthy project management approach where you need to have business translators and technical team. Our own people are the experts on what we needed, and the Microsoft low-code/no-code technology enabled them to build our solution quickly.”

Faster reporting and greater customer loyalty

Now, with the solution in production use, its impact on insights and decision-making is evident throughout Carrefour. For example, Tawfiq points to management reporting, which has accelerated from 2 days reporting to 30 minutes. In addition, the company can now create operational reports in real-time from anywhere across the retail unit’s 16 international markets. 

That real-time reporting is crucial for Majid Al Futtaim Retail. “By integrating business and operational data and getting transaction results within seconds, we can see how specific products are performing in specific stores as sales are being made,” says Tawfiq. “Maybe a product is underperforming during a promotion because it’s not properly displayed or replenished. We use this as an important tool to alert the store manager in time to turn that store’s promotion into a success.”

Majid Al Futtaim Retail now also uses the solution for real-time forecasting for monthly sales, omnichannel reporting and insights, and revisions to its promotional and pricing strategies based on competitive intelligence insights. Best of all, executives and managers use the Intelligent Data Platform to help drive their focus on customer experience and innovation. 

“We now include our customer insights data in our Power BI dashboards,” says Bhandari. “We had this information before, but it was isolated in data silos and difficult to access. We’re placing a renewed focus on our customer loyalty program, for example, and we use this information to design marketing strategies and promotions that guide customers back to our stores.”

Impacting business today, spurring innovation into the future

Faster reporting isn’t the only time savings that Majid Al Futtaim Retail sees from the solution. By eliminating manual reporting via spreadsheets, the company’s Finance Department has shifted more than 6,500 personnel hours formerly spent on preparing and managing data to creating and providing customer insights wherever and whenever they’re needed. 

“With this solution in place, we have redeployed our people to create insights, not manage data,” says Bhandari. “It enables us to intensify our customer focus, and that’s what drives success throughout the company.

Looking ahead, Majid Al Futtaim Retail plans to further optimize its processes and innovate in core business areas with Azure AI. And, adds Tawfiq, the company will continue to push the limits of technology to create engaging experiences for its customers. “Our company vision is to create ‘Great Moments for Everyone, Everyday’ and we strive to realize this vision by becoming the most valued, trusted and innovative retailer serving our customers whenever, wherever, and however they choose.”

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