David Jones leans on Snowflake for de-merger modernisation

David Jones is using Snowflake as a data integration fabric to accelerate its digital transformation following its de-merger from South Africa's Woolworths Holdings two years ago.

The department store adopted Snowflake at the same time as it formalised the creation of a new IT division and operating model under the leadership of chief technology officer Hugh Fahy.

Speaking to iTnews, Fahy explained that under David Jones’ previous shared-services model within Woolworths’ Country Road Group, the company was in the process of implementing an AWS-based data warehouse architecture.

“Ultimately, as often is the case with a data project, the business was not realising value from that investment,” he said.

“It was a very technology-led investment and, often times, that is about the completeness of the data, whereas Snowflake created the opportunity for us to drive to value as a first principle.”

David Jones first used Snowflake to extract data from its operational source systems, and then “get it into good shape, create a semantic layer”, and establish governance access controls.

With budget constraints limiting the hiring of additional data scientists, the department store is now using Snowflake as a data fabric and “pumping” data out to various specialists to provide analytics and insights from the information.

These include Peak.AI, a UK-based firm using AI to analyse price elasticity; Singapore’s Trustana, which supports online product descriptions; and Style Arcade, which applies predictive intelligence to fashion merchandising.

The data fabric is also underpinning David Jones’ supply chain visibility and responsiveness.

“We've ingested a lot of the product and inventory data, and we get that in semi-real time,” Fahy said.

"We’ve already uplifted our allocation capability, and we're building on what we've learned from that process to help with the rest of our planning and buying activities.”

Currently, David Jones’ supply chain initiatives have focused on optimisation, but plans are underway for a “substantial uplift” across the end-to-end process.

“The end state would be a great deal more automation and insight across the whole supply chain,” he said.

“We've been working upstream, so we have the platforms in to give us visibility in terms of because a lot of our merch is shipped from Europe.

“We want to be able to triangulate the flow of those logistics.”

"Amazing results”

David Jones was sold to private equity firm Anchorage Capital Partners for approximately $100 million in 2022, but only completed its technical separation from the shared services model in July last year.

While the separation left the new, independent tech team with a significant legacy system footprint, it also granted freedom to plan and execute future tech projects.

“187-year-old companies have quite a lot of heritage,” Fahy said. “We managed to onboard that technology and have operated it successfully for the calendar year.

Already, the team has “optimised” its separate ITSM, development and operating structures to an integrated DevOps model "with a good deal of agility”.

Although full technology rationalisation is still a way off, Fahy said the team is experimenting with using AI to do some of the uplift, either re-planning or re-platforming, “with amazing results”.

“I'm always amazed where you've got a fully deprecated platform or language, how much your favourite [AI] model knows already about that capability, and how quickly it can transform that into something more interesting,” he said.

Describing the strategy as “value creation at the edge,” Fahy explained that initiatives including a new mobile app, headless website, and loyalty program have all been built on separate systems, linked together via APIs.

“Our Snowflake instance is extracting data from those operational systems but not interfering with them,” he said,

“We built that over a new set of APIs, but it never really touched the core, intrinsic operation of the business.”

He noted that David Jones’ technology team is relatively small – around 100 permanent people – for an organisation of its size.

"One of the reasons we can maintain a relatively small tech team for a relatively large business is the advent of [this technology], so we're using it to the max across the whole of the estate,” he added.