Bunnings has analysed a decade’s worth of Australian weather data to help personalise its customer marketing and in-store merchandising efforts.
The DIY and hardware chain used its Snowflake-based enterprise data platform to crunch a vast volume of rainfall and temperature data and compare it with its internal records over 10 years.
The insights gleaned from the exercise are now served to Bunnings executives in marketing and merchandising every Monday morning to inform their weekly strategies.
“We’ve always known weather plays a role in a customer’s purchasing decision. Until recently though, we were not able to quantify that,” Bunnings CIO Genevieve Elliott told an audience at a Snowflake World Tour event in Sydney.
“We looked at it by store location, department and product; by day by hour. That’s a massive data set. We got to the insights by running about 5000 long-term time series models. Those gave us insights into how products perform when [there’s] a certain level of rainfall and certain temperatures.”
However, running that quantity of data would normally take two days in total, Elliott said, when the big ask was: “‘Can we have it every Monday by 9am?’”
Using the EDP, an Azure-based platform that “sits at the heart of [Bunnings’] enterprise architecture, Elliott’s team were able to optimise the process to produce the relevant insights “in a two-hour window every Monday morning”.
“We now have an accurate picture of what products sell well, so we can take a localised approach to marketing and in-store merchandising, rather than a blanket countrywide approach,” Elliott added.
Over recent years, Bunnings has been increasingly adopting a range of cloud-based systems from the likes of Google, Microsoft, Workday, Salesforce and SAP, plus software-as-a-service and cloud-based solutions for a range of core systems.
Now, the retailer is focused on producing “some great AI models” using advanced analytics, according to Elliott.
These will be “productionised and sit within our core systems”, she said.
“Our investment in structured data in the Snowflake platform within EDP has been designed to be integrated into many of the SaaS platforms we have already invested in,” she added.
“This really sets us up to be able to move with GenAI at pace.”