In January 2017, the AURELIUS Group (Germany) acquired the European operations of Office Depot, creating Office Depot Europe, which is now the leading reseller of workplace products and services. Unlike many traditional companies that chose to build online as a completely separate business, Office Depot chose the path of online/offline integration. Office Depot was receiving data from three channels: the offline catalog, the online website, and customer call centers.
Office Depot envisioned a three-tiered data hub, with a data lake, a data warehouse and data marts. The architecture includes an on-premise Hadoop cluster using Hortonworks, Talend Data Integration and Data Quality to perform checks and quality control on data before ingesting it into the Hub’s data lake. Integrating online and offline data results in a unified, 360-degree view of the customer and a clear picture of the customer journey. Office Depot’s data hub approach also provides high-quality data to all back-office functions throughout the organization, including supply chain and finance.