100-Year-Old Retailer Canadian Tire Modernizes Data Platform with Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI

Canadian Tire Corporation (CTC) is a group of companies that includes more than 1,700 retail and gasoline outlets across Canada. Its retail business is led by Canadian Tire, which was founded in 1922 and provides Canadians with products for life in Canada across its Living, Playing, Fixing, Automotive and Seasonal & Gardening divisions.

Over the past 100 years, Canadian Tire has seen tremendous growth, becoming one of Canada’s most beloved and trusted brands, focused on connecting and supporting the communities it serves across the country. 

As part of its ‘Better Connected’ strategy, Canadian Tire Corporation is Investing approximately $2.2 billion to create a connected omnichannel customer experience, with $1.2 billion allocated to improving the connection of digital and physical channels and driving an enhanced customer experience. 

With its increased focus on leveraging technology to improve retail experiences and better serve customers, CTC is looking to leverage near-real-time insights and prioritize data-driven decision-making. As a result, the organization decided to shift their data to the cloud. With nearly 10 different visualization tools and two cloud platforms in the data ecosystem, CTC knew it was time to consolidate its tooling and data across the organization. Determined to streamline its platform and create a single source of the truth, CTC set out to build a new modernized data platform.  Ahamed Mohideen, AVP of Data & Insight Enablement at Canadian Tire Corporation, helped lead this new initiative.

Selecting the Right Tools

Wanting to follow a data mesh architecture, CTC engaged a vendor to help build a strategic vision for the new platform. Azure Synapse Analytics quickly emerged as the top choice for CTC’s data warehousing tool. Not only does Azure Synapse Analytics seamlessly integrate into an Azure ecosystem, but it also provides advanced control over the way data is utilized and distributed and helps minimize the overall number of tools used. With the goal of an aligned Microsoft platform, CTC is working towards standardizing on Power BI. The cohesive suite of tools and services will offer easy integration and help round out the overall reporting platform. 

After confirming the tech stack supported by Microsoft Azure, CTC set out to establish its roadmap for the migration. Over the course of the next four years, Ahamed and his team hope to confirm strategy and tooling, establish a new platform, empower self-service across the organization, and retire their legacy system through Synapse. 

Crafting a New and Refined Architecture

Originally, the architecture in place had nine landing steps to get from the raw, operational system data to downstream consumption. Having data processed through multiple steps proved inefficient and difficult to scale. Ahamed wanted to rebuild an architecture that prioritized reusable assets and reduced replication. With the new, reimagined architecture, data moves from the data lake to downstream consumption in just five short steps. Data that once took weeks to access can now be utilized within a few hours. 

Data starts in operational systems and lands in Delta Lake within an Azure Data Lake Storage where unstructured data is unpacked into a consumable format. From the Delta Lake, data is moved into a curated data model within Azure Synapse Analytics. Data is filtered into enterprise data marts to create domain-specific containers to support downstream consumption. Enterprise data marts within the Synapse Semantic Layer can be prepared with Spark and Serverless SQL pools. Within the curated data model, there are domain leads that oversee the structure of the data that they govern and the data mart that is attached to it. 

Data is then moved into a semantic layer, also hosted in Azure Synapse Analytics, where citizen developers can access governed data models that can then be used for data visualization. By having individually managed data marts and containers for downstream consumption, CTC maintains a more decentralized architecture, enabling self-service, all the while keeping an eye on security and data governance. 

The Canadian Tire team worked closely with Microsoft to bring this solution to life. “We got [a lot] of help from Microsoft when we started our POC journey to certify Azure Synapse Analytics for Canadian Tire. [Microsoft] really helped with certification and figuring out all the components we needed to deploy to have the Synapse platform fully running,” says Chereka Geresu, a solution architect with CTC who helped with the deployment of the Azure Synapse as part of CTC’s intelligence hub.  

Leveraging Power BI Across the Organization

Once data is ready for downstream consumption, it’s utilized in multiple visualization tools, including Power BI. While self-service reporting is dominant within the organization, CTC also has a few large-scale centralized Power BI initiatives to help support the organization internally and externally. 

From a business consumption perspective, Power BI reports are used to provide statistics to distributors surrounding store performance and their ability to provide products to stores. A dashboard was created for Canadian Tire Associate Dealers to understand the performance of certain products and aid in future decisions regarding supply. Another big point of Power BI usage within CTC highlights the analytics of various data products and programs. Dashboards highlight the performance of data programs, adoption rates for analytical platforms, data quality and more. Senior leadership on the team regularly uses these dashboards to support decision-making surrounding data programs and prioritize programs with more usage. 

Initially, CTC engaged a third-party vendor to help establish the design of these dashboards. Once all the dashboards were built and established, Ahamed and his team took on the responsibility of maintenance and working with adjacent teams to manage and validate data ingestion. 

To encourage more self-service across the organization, Ahamed and his team have established ‘Communities in Practice’, a center of excellence used to help drive adoption and foster learning. Communities in Practice hosts regular lunch and learns and multiple cohorts of training to encourage skill uplift across the organization. As part of the onboarding to the new platform, the Data & Insight Enablement team is focused on keeping platform enablement and organizational readiness the main objectives of current onboarding and learning initiatives. 

Planning Migration and Driving Adoption

Currently, Ahamed and his team are close to having a fully defined platform and are focused on migration planning. With tooling and tooling enablement solidified, the next step is to move business teams off legacy platforms and start expanding adoption, including the expansion and improvement of Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI connectivity.

“Canadian Tire Corporation is a very large organization which requires highly scalable capability that can easily serve different business units, whether it is building a data product or visualizations. We need very robust services that can help [make data accessible]. Utilizing all the different operating systems and the data that comes from those—we need to get there,” says Geresu.  

Early adoption programs have shown success and exhibited growing enthusiasm for the new platform. The team targeted a few key business groups and invited them as early adopters and advocates to the overall platform. Based on initial responses, users are excited about the new platform shift and are eager to have access to high-quality data faster than ever before.

CTC is excited about how this new modernized platform will help revolutionize the way the organization operates within the retail space, and how it can leverage high-quality data to better serve its customers and communities. 

Find out more about Canadian Tire Company on Twitter and LinkedIn.