Carrefour expands data warehouse

Levallois-Perret, France Carrefour is expanding its data warehouse to support business analytics within its marketing department.

Armed with the Active Enterprise Data Warehouse from Miamisburg, Ohio-based Teradata, Carrefour reportedly has the largest customer-behavior database in France, based on the unit’s information-management capacity and stored customer-data history. As it continues to converge massive data volumes from 1,230 stores, including its hypermarkets and supermarkets, however, Carrefour knew it had to make some revisions before it could expand EDW usage to its marketing department.

Carrefour and Teradata worked together to increase the repository’s information capacity to manage higher volumes of data. It also programmed EDW to process data in near-real time.

The new enterprise-intelligence platform, which was live within six months, supports more detailed analysis of data regarding consumer behavior and purchasing. It also provides better management of the chain’s marketing campaigns.

For example, Carrefour’s brand marketers need to manage data points for more than 60,000 customer categories and more than 14 million households. The new EDW will provide an enterprise view of shopper activity in each store, and Carrefour plans to use the technology to localize promotions to shoppers at each of its hypermarkets and supermarkets.

“We want to target every customer in a precise and relevant fashion during our marketing operations,” said Gerard Castrie, marketing and communication director, Carrefour France. “This includes not over-communicating with them, and measuring a significant return on investment.”

Looking ahead, the chain expects to have 70 users continuously submitting complex requests for these tasks. The platform will be able to deliver responses within minutes, according to a company statement.