Data Product Platform Transformation
How Colruyt cut downtime from days to 1 hour and boosted deployment speed by 90%!
Colruyt Group is one of Belgium’s largest and most recognized retailers, known for its wide range of brands and services covering the entire customer journey. As a data-driven organization, Colruyt sees data as essential to improving operational efficiency, delivering customer value, and generating strategic insights.
Challenge
Colruyt Group chose to build an on-premise data platform to keep full control of their infrastructure. However, this decision introduced several significant challenges:
Non-scalable and complex platform that was difficult to maintain and evolve as data needs grew.
Limited internal data engineering expertise, which made it hard to manage the platform effectively.
Slow deployment cycles, causing delays in delivering new features and updates.
Recovery from failures often took days, leading to extended downtime and business disruption.
Low adoption and trust from business users due to inconsistent performance and reliability.
Lack of clear visibility for leadership into the root causes of platform issues, making it hard to prioritize fixes and improvements.
Solution
To overcome these challenges, Colruyt partnered with Dataminded to tackle both technical obstacles and organizational skill gaps. Dataminded’s dual approach focused on:
Technical Transformation: Simplifying the data platform architecture, introducing automation, and stabilizing deployment and data ingestion processes to increase reliability and scalability.
Team Enablement: Providing hands-on coaching and training to upskill Colruyt’s internal team, embedding industry best practices, and building long-term confidence and craftsmanship.
This partnership was more than a vendor-client relationship. As Kris Peeters, CEO of Dataminded, explained:
“There wasn’t a Dataminded team and a Colruyt team, it was just one team.”
Results
Through close collaboration with Dataminded, Colruyt Group transformed their complex data platform into a streamlined, scalable foundation for growth. The new platform enables rapid, reliable deployments, accelerating release cycles from monthly to daily and drastically reduces failure rates from 30% to under 10%.
Recovery times improved significantly, while data loss incidents dropped to zero. Beyond technology, the upskilled internal team now confidently manages the platform, driving continuous innovation and delivering greater business value.
Download the Case Study PDF
