Modernizing Ab inBev’s data architecture to improve predictive analytics and forecast (sponsored by Talend)

Description

AB InBev is the world’s largest beer maker, with a diverse portfolio of over 500 beer brands, including Budweiser, Corona, Stella Artois, Beck’s, Hoegaarden, and Leffe. Because the company has grown through acquisitions, its data ecosystem was comprised of Salesforce, 15 SAP instances, 27 ERP systems, 23 ETL tools, and a host of brewers operating as independent entities with their own internal systems. When Harinder Singh assumed leadership for data strategy and solution architecture at AB inBev in 2017, he set out to change things—starting with the creation of an enterprise data hub.

AB inBev extracts data from a vast range of sources to better understand customer tastes, improve store and bar experiences, supply chain optimization, product development, and more. With Microsoft Azure Cloud and Talend Data Fabric, AB inBev consolidated its data into a single repository, and optimized its data pipelines. This strategy has freed up the data science team from menial, time-consuming tasks so that they can focus on testing new data models and analyzing data. The increased speed has had a major impact on production and demand forecasting, which in turn helps with operations planning. All of the newly gained insights also feed into Ab inBev new product development, enabling the teams to create best-selling beverages from the get-go.

Join Harinder to explore AB InBev’s data modernization journey and explore both the company’s legacy architecture and its new cloud-based one. Along the way, he explains the choices made by his team and details the implementation of a new central data hub on Microsoft Azure and related data migration. Harinder also shares some of the technical and business benefits of the new architecture as well as some lessons learned along the way from the digital transformation at Ab inBEv.

This session is sponsored by Talend.