Al-Futtaim becomes customer-centric with Databricks

Overview

Al-Futtaim, a Middle East conglomerate distributing brands like Toyota, IKEA and Marks & Spencer across 200+ brands, built a unified 'golden customer record' on the Databricks Data + AI Platform with Delta Lake and Delta Sharing, replacing a legacy on-premises data warehouse. This delivered a 10% increase in automotive sales, a 30% decrease in lost sale opportunity and inventory holding cost, and 4x faster time-to-insight.

The challenge

Al-Futtaim's legacy on-premises data warehouse created data silos across its 200+ brands, so business intelligence dashboard development was slow, forecasting was limited to classical algorithms and not scalable, and customer insights were too generalized to affect outcomes faster.

The solution

Al-Futtaim modernized on the Databricks Data + AI Platform, adopting a lakehouse architecture with Delta Lake for ETL pipelines, Databricks SQL for self-service querying, Delta Sharing for cross-brand data collaboration, and is increasing adoption of Unity Catalog for data governance, to build a unified 'golden customer record' across brands.

Reported business value

The order forecasting and inventory management model reduced loss sale opportunity and inventory holding cost by 30%; a data-driven Toyota marketing campaign using recommendation engines and segmentation increased automotive sales by 10%; and business stakeholders now receive insights up to four times faster than before.