Spar Builds a Bird’s Eye View of Over 13,000 Stores with Designer Cloud

Core Challenges

Spar wanted to build a global report of its 13,000 stores that span a total of 48 countries. However, each country operates under its own unique product naming conventions, works with its own suppliers and brands, and often has its own currency. Finding the common denominator in all of that data—let alone standardizing and joining it—was too big of an undertaking. Finally, Spar also wanted to leverage Nielsen data to run comparisons against competition, but this data, too, had its own categorization for products that needed to be standardized to fit Spar’s reporting.

How Designer Cloud Solved this Problem

Spar built a data workflow that relies upon the combination of Amazon S3 buckets and Designer Cloud to store data and then cleanse, standardize, and join it for reporting in PowerBI. With Designer Cloud, Spar has been able to quickly standardize unpredictable retailer data and build a high-level global report that, frankly, the Spar team had never achieved before. On top of that, Spar has also been able to leverage Nielsen data to benchmark store and category performance. The success of this data aggregation project has not only allowed Spar to better understand its global retailers and competitors, but has also prodded the team to ask new, more complex questions that are now possible to answer with this advanced level of reporting.