Made to Move You
Client
Aldo
Industry
Retail / Fashion
Capabilities
Data Engineering
System Re-Architecture
CI/CD
AI-readiness
Partners
IVADO Labs
ITL Group supported
by SCALE AI
Date
Nov 2023 – Ongoing
The Challenge
ALDO Group aimed to transform its revenue management and supply chain processes through advanced AI-driven analytics. However, their existing infrastructure limited their ability to leverage real-time data effectively. Data from point-of-sale systems, e-commerce platforms, inventory, and merchandising needed to be collected and organized. Building an organized analytics data lake became crucial for business operations such as markdown pricing, demand forecasting, and inventory balancing. Our goal was to move ALDO off its reliance on manual workflows, improve data freshness for analytics use-cases, and ultimately enhance their ability to make rapid data-driven decisions.
The Solution
Retailogists partnered with ALDO to address these challenges by developing a modern, scalable, and cloud-native data platform, laying the essential groundwork for advanced analytics and seamless AI integration. Key elements of our solution included:
Key Activities
Centralized Data Lake
We established a unified Amazon S3 data lake structured through Hive partitioning, which allowed efficient data organization, processing, and real-time querying with Amazon Athena. This centralization eliminated data silos and enabled a single source of truth.
Serverless Data Pipelines
Leveraging AWS Glue for extract-transform-load (ETL) tasks, we implemented both incremental (real-time data ingestion) and historical (bulk data migration) pipelines. AWS Lambda and Step Functions orchestrated these workflows, automating complex tasks and ensuring robust scalability and error handling.
ACID Compliance and Reliability
To maintain data integrity, we implemented transactional strategies, including partition-level atomic updates and rollback mechanisms. This approach prevented inconsistencies and ensured high-quality data for analytics.
CI/CD and Monitoring
Retailogists integrated industry-leading DevOps practices with a comprehensive CI/CD setup, significantly streamlining deployments. We also established extensive monitoring systems through AWS CloudWatch and Sumo Logic, facilitating prompt detection and resolution of pipeline issues and ensuring continuous operational reliability.
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By addressing these key technical challenges, our solution transformed ALDO’s fragmented legacy environment into a unified, scalable, and AI-ready data ecosystem, enabling immediate and ongoing advancements in AI-driven analytics.
The Results
The infrastructure overhaul delivered transformative improvements, laying a solid foundation for real-time analytics and AI applications:
- Real-Time Data Availability:
Enabled near-real-time data ingestion and processing, drastically improving decision-making speed—from days to minutes—allowing ALDO to swiftly respond to changing market demands and consumer trends.
- Enhanced Scalability and Performance:
Significantly reduced data processing times, efficiently managing massive workloads such as record-breaking Black Friday sales without disruptions or downtime, ensuring optimal business continuity.
- Improved Data Integrity:
Ensured reliable, consistent data availability through ACID-compliant practices, greatly bolstering internal user confidence in analytics and AI-driven insights, enabling more accurate and timely decision-making.
- AI Readiness and Business Agility:
Immediately positioned ALDO to deploy predictive models for markdown optimization, inventory balancing, and demand forecasting. Early results included notably improved sell-through rates, reduced markdown waste, optimized inventory levels, and enhanced margins.
- Operational Efficiency and Cost Savings:
Automation of data processing workflows eliminated extensive manual interventions, reducing operational overhead, lowering costs, and freeing up resources for more strategic initiatives.
- Strategic Foundation for Growth:
Established a resilient, future-proof platform capable of supporting advanced analytics and AI-driven innovation, positioning ALDO Group for sustained growth and adaptability in an evolving retail landscape.
Ultimately, this initiative not only resolved ALDO’s immediate technical bottlenecks but also created a robust platform for ongoing innovation and continuous improvement in retail operations through sophisticated AI-driven decision-making.
