Anchoring the Analytics Workstream of a $250M Transformation
The analytics spine of a five-year, $250M program replacing 90% of legacy systems across 50+ brands in 20+ countries.
Role: Senior Manager · De-facto Program Manager
Business Problem
Alshaya launched one of the world's largest retail transformations — replacing Oracle Retail ERP, BlueYonder, and IBM OMS across a vast brand portfolio. The analytics workstream had to keep executive decision-making intact while the ground shifted beneath it.
Architecture
A consolidation architecture: a unified Azure Data Lake (Databricks) ingesting structured and unstructured data from 50+ sources into a single source of truth spanning Merchandise, Corporate, Finance, Customer, and Logistics, with an Oracle ADW reporting platform on top.
Technology
Delivery
Governed a portfolio of 100+ projects and 400+ change requests over five years with cumulative budgets exceeding $30M, supported by project managers, delivery managers, and shared services — and chaired the monthly C-suite steering committee.
Challenges
- Maintaining analytical continuity while 90% of legacy systems were replaced.
- Coordinating a multi-vendor ecosystem at global scale.
- Governing budget and change across 100+ concurrent projects.
Solution
Delivered a single-source-of-truth data lake and a 60+ report Oracle ADW platform with self-service BI for Finance, while orchestrating vendors and steering-committee decisions to keep the program on course.
Business Outcome
- Contributed to 3–5% p.a. sales growth and 4.5% margin improvement.
- 20% batch-processing improvement toward near-real-time reporting.
- A durable analytics foundation surviving a full platform replacement.
Lessons Learned
At transformation scale, the analytics layer is the nervous system. Consolidating to one source of truth is what lets leadership steer while everything else is rebuilt.
Future Roadmap
Progressive migration to near-real-time streaming, deeper self-service enablement, and AI-assisted forecasting across the brand portfolio.