“At Ahold Delhaize, our goal is simple. Helping our customers to lead healthier, more convenient lives, and our partners to thrive in a competitive market. All with the aid of technology.”

Thanh Hà Nguyen, Senior IT Director of Data and Analytics & Digital Engagement at Ahold Delhaize, is describing the culture of customer and partner empowerment that his company promotes – and the role that technology plays in realizing it. 

As a leading European retailer serving 54 million people every week, Ahold Delhaize is no stranger to the pressures that the industry is facing to provide unique, tailored services to its customers – and the importance of data in achieving them.

“Data is the essence of all we do at Ahold Delhaize,” Nguyen says. “And together with our partners, we’re committed to making the most of it.” 

That has meant building a data platform that allows it to gain user insights, personalize its offering and identify convenience opportunities within the global network of brands it manages. 

“We’ve created a whole new customer experience centered around providing healthier recommendations for our customers and sending out more targeted, personalized promotions,” he says. “Of course Privacy compliance is at the heart of everything we do at Ahold Delhaize. Such targeted, personalized promotions are sent only to customers that have given their consent for it.”

“But that was just the beginning. We now have a platform that allows us to generate value across the entire organization – ultimately helping us and our partners to pursue collective success.”

Transforming operations using data

Ahold Delhaize operates 19 retail brands across Eastern US, Europe and Indonesia – serving millions of customers each week and running around 7,000 stores. 

Within this network, Nguyen’s division serves local brands in Belgium, Greece, Serbia, Czech and Romania.

“Our mantra is ‘eat well, save time, live better’, and it’s all about helping people to buy healthier products and shop more efficiently,” he says. “We want to inspire, create convenience and provide recommendations to our customers whilst also generating revenue.

“All of that starts with data.” 

Over the years, Ahold Delhaize has been exploring ways to create data-driven value throughout multiple parts of its business – from driving financial insights to improving store operations, optimizing the supply chain and more. 

In Belgium, where Nguyen operates, that led them to rethink the loyalty program, which he calls “the heart of customer lifetime value”. 

“We saw our Belgian customer loyalty program as the perfect steppingstone for our digitalization ambitions,” he says. “For years, this was outdated, slow, and centered around targeting households rather than individual customers,” he says. 

“But it became clear that a new vision was required; that enriching the program would allow us to drive personalization, insights, and by default, more revenue. And we hoped it would trigger more and similar initiatives across the other brands in our network.”

Soon enough, however, Ahold Delhaize realized that this couldn’t be achieved without support.  

“We needed to develop advanced analytics platforms that would give us that kind of power,” he says, “while also being scalable for all the other business areas we wanted to transform using our encrypted data. 

“Thankfully, Microsoft was the ideal partner to achieve these goals.”

Building a flexible platform with the Microsoft Cloud

Ahold Delhaize’s Azure Data Platform aims to bring together previously siloed data sources into a single location – and then leverage them to drive personalization, optimize operations and unlock alternative revenue streams.

“We wanted to start using the cloud technology to perform advanced analytics,” says Stephane Desaeger, Data & Analytics Center of Excellence Domain Lead at Ahold Delhaize. 

“We already had various other platforms at our disposal, but we still needed one for personalization and insights. So, we started thinking about how we could invest strategically in the cloud, and in solutions that would allow us to perform these advanced analytics. The one that best met our criteria was Microsoft.”

According to him, the platform uses Azure Data Lake technology to store raw data that is then ingested with Azure Data Factory. The encrypted data is then processed through Azure Databricks where it undergoes further processing until it is finally pushed into Azure Synapse Analytics. This technology then allows to prepare the data and structure it in a consumable way for Power BI or other endpoints like engagement platforms. 

“We are now moving more into Synapse Serverless SQL Pool, which allows us to query the data in a performant and cost efficient way and serve various use cases,” he adds. 

“That’s because with twenty-eight data products on the platform, proper data governance and privacy compliance is a prerequisite. At the same time, we see a growing need for self-service, so we wanted to provide data catalogs that are fully embedded into the platform."

“This guarantees clarity for our users on the data provided, right where they need it – on a Power BI dashboard or using data sets in Azure Synapse. In the next stages, Azure Purview will be implemented to deliver any additional catalog capabilities such as lineage.”

The result of collaborative effort, designed to benefit an entire community

According to Nguyen, essential to the initiative has been the company’s ‘Scaled Agile’ working philosophy – which allowed Ahold Delhaize, its internal and external partners and brands, to collaborate on the creation of a scalable platform centered around empowering collective success. 

“What I love about this platform is that it’s the result of a great collaboration between us, Microsoft, and some key partners such as Avanade and DXC Technology. 

“In line with our ‘Me-To-We’ motto, we have embedded our partners into our teams as one, carrying out work based on best practices, agreeing clarity on what’s coming next, and creating a space for feedback too.”

But even more than partnerships, he adds, it is the user experience and consumption that determines the success of the platform. 

"That’s precisely what we’ve achieved here: a data community practice at scale,” he says.

Changing the profile of customer loyalty schemes with a focus on health

The platform sits at the core of Ahold Delhaize’s marketing and customer loyalty initiatives – which are now more tailored and targeted, centered around augmenting the shopping experience. 

“From online to in-store and app-based shopping, our solution allows us to be more proactive in our marketing and promotion than ever,” says Nguyen. “For example, instead of passively waiting for customers to check our web shop for promotions or rewards, we can push those out to customers that have given consent based on their habits and behaviors.”

This is even more crucial when the recommendations are targeted towards healthier alternatives. “We strive to put our live better motto truly at the heart of all we do,” he explains. “That means using the visibility and extended reach the platform gives us to promote healthy and sustainable products amongst our customers.” 

Beyond loyalty, reducing waste and increasing supplier performance

There is much more to Ahold Delhaize’s platform than the customer loyalty program, says Nguyen. 

“Playing our role in tackling climate change is paramount for our organization – and the data platform is the perfect place to start,” he says.

Food waste is a prime example. “In Romania, one of our brands is using our advanced analytics capabilities to better track expiring products and optimize when they’re put on sale,” he continues. 

“In the future, we plan to apply this principle to environment-centric initiatives too.”

Ahold Delhaize is also focusing on enabling its wider partner ecosystem with the benefits of the platform. “Customer loyalty is crucial for us,our partners, brands and teams. We can provide them context and meaning to data so they can increase their performance” says Desaeger. 

“That's something that’s valuable for us and them. It’s an opportunity for us to empower them even more.”  

“We have great ambitions for the coming years,” says Nguyen. “We want to use our data even more and transform it into actionable information that will generate value at every iteration, and at all stages of the value chain. 

“To do it, we need to keep on democratizing the use and activation of our data through a solid foundation. Thanks to our new platform, we are confident that we’re heading in that direction.” "