FMCG leader redesigns data architecture with help of Mosaic Island
Overhauling the data landscape at a global fast-moving consumer goods firm is no small task – so when one of the industry’s top players sought to do that, it knew it would need help. The firm turned to consultants from Mosaic Island for support – who delivered a modernised data mesh, to realise improved governance and trust in data and consistent metadata standards.
Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) refer to products that are sold quickly at relatively low costs, including items like food, beverages, toiletries, and cleaning products. This market is characterized by high demand and rapid turnover, making it a crucial segment of the retail and manufacturing industries. As a result, the sector’s decisions are mostly driven by resource optimisation and cost-effectiveness – which are becoming increasingly important, as sudden supply chain shocks and geo-political disruptions are impacting demand and supply dynamics in more unpredictable ways by the week.
These factors were at play when a global FTSE 40 FMCG company embarked on a mission to modernise its data landscape as part of a wider enterprise transformation. With operations in more than 120 markets, the £32 billion revenue client faced increasing challenges from legacy systems, fragmented platforms, and inconsistent data governance.
As is often the case over large and diverse operations, the client’s data landscape had become fragmented and siloed, with various lines of business deploying localised data warehouses and analytics platforms. This legacy estate had evolved with inconsistent data standards, disconnected governance, and redundant integrations.
This siloing would take more than the installation of new technology to deal with, too. Despite adopting leading analytics platforms, integration into a cohesive enterprise data ecosystem remained incomplete.
Aware of the complexity of the challenge ahead, the client engage Mosaic Island for support. The firm was selected for its deep expertise in enterprise architecture, data strategy, and complex IT transformation.
The client tasked Mosaic Island’s consultants with defining a modern, scalable, and federated enterprise data architecture – paving the way for self-service analytics, responsible AI adoption, and trusted data-driven decision-making across the business. The work included deep analysis of existing platforms and workflows, technical and business stakeholder engagement, and alignment with the client’s IT strategy and cloud transformation initiatives.
The roadmap
According to an account of the project published by Mosaic Island, the firm first delivered a target architecture blueprint. This Hub-and-Spoke model, alongside a Databricks based data mesh, was designed to govern data products across domains such as Finance, B2B Sales, and Supply Chain.
A data mesh is an architectural framework that solves advanced data security challenges, providing federated data ownership, that enables local autonomy while maintaining enterprise governance through shared standards and reusable assets. Organisations have multiple data sources from different lines of business that must be integrated for analytics. This necessitated platform capability assessments, across key pillars including: data governance and quality; master data management; ingestion and ETL pipelines; and semantic models and AI enablement. This helped to establish a set of data principles, a capability model and data patterns, to direct design and delivery activities within the data mesh.
Mosaic Island also provided migration strategies for replacing or uplifting legacy data platforms, including: consolidating market-specific SQL Server DWHs; migrating analytics workloads to Databricks (software which combines elements of data warehouses and data lakes for managing structured and unstructured data); embedding Zero-Copy sharing via Delta Sharing; and a framework to assess analytics and AI workloads for architecture suitability, TCO, value, and time-to-insight.
The assessment produced an enterprise data architecture strategy that defined a clear path to a modern, governed, and scalable enterprise data platform. Ultimately, this enabled self-service analytics via a governed data marketplace, and a federated but compliant level of domain ownership through the data mesh. And while it enabled AI-ready architecture supporting machine learning models and activated insights, it also improved governance and trust in data and consistent metadata standards.
Reflecting on the project, a spokesperson from Mosaic Island concluded, “With this new architecture vision, our FMCG client is well-positioned to unlock the full value of its data assets, increase agility across business units, and support intelligent decision-making at scale.”
