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Case Study

Loyalty is in the Data: 

How AIR MILES found value in efficient Data sharing.

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Loyalty is in the Data: 

How AIR MILES found value in efficient Data sharing.

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About AIR MILES

AIR MILES, Canada's most renowned loyalty program, boasts an extensive network comprising over 200 retailer brands awarding customers through in-store, online, and credit card transactions.

The ubiquitous presence of AIR MILES Cards in everyday transactions, from grocery stores to gas stations to online retailers, leads to a reward being redeemed every 3.3 seconds, which generates profound and invaluable insights for clients, enabling them to forge unprecedented connections with their customers.

Key Outcome

By utilizing our DataPod approach, AIR MILES was able to speed up its innovative business transformation.

We accomplished this by developing their data exchange product, conducting R&D, and partnering in business development for the solution.

image001

About AIR MILES

AIR MILES, Canada's most renowned loyalty program, boasts an extensive network comprising over 200 retailer brands awarding customers through in-store, online, and credit card transactions.

The ubiquitous presence of AIR MILES Cards in everyday transactions, from grocery stores to gas stations to online retailers, leads to a reward being redeemed every 3.3 seconds, which generates profound and invaluable insights for clients, enabling them to forge unprecedented connections with their customers.

Key Outcome

By utilizing our DataPod approach, AIR MILES was able to speed up its innovative business transformation.

We accomplished this by developing their data exchange product, conducting R&D, and partnering in business development for the solution.

Untangle

Data by the ton - How to leverage it?

AIR MILES has vast data in its data lake, boasting nearly 9 million active collectors,  each contributing to a large-scale database of thousands of data points and insights on collectors across Canada.

While this is undoubtedly an advantage, it also poses a challenge in efficiently and cost-effectively sharing the data with partners.

To overcome this, AIR MILES created a data product that would allow partners access to their loyalty metrics and AIR MILES' program intelligence and enable them to upload other data sets into Snowflake and create further value analytics.

This approach aims to improve partner tooling and value-added services to increase partner value and retention, and to help attract new business.

Untangle

Data by the ton - How to leverage it?

AIR MILES has vast data in its data lake, boasting nearly 9 million active collectors,  each contributing to a large-scale database of thousands of data points and insights on collectors across Canada.

While this is undoubtedly an advantage, it also poses a challenge in efficiently and cost-effectively sharing the data with partners.

To overcome this, AIR MILES created a data product that would allow partners access to their loyalty metrics and AIR MILES' program intelligence and enable them to upload other data sets into Snowflake and create further value analytics.

This approach aims to improve partner tooling and value-added services to increase partner value and retention, and to help attract new business.

How Infostrux helped

AIR MILES enlisted the help of Infostrux to complete their project quickly and with minimal risk. By combining Infostrux's knowledge of the Data Cloud with AIR MILES' internal expertise, they could efficiently implement a collaborative approach with Infostrux's DataPod approach.

Infostrux started by integrating Snowflake and AWS, building a foundational data platform infrastructure, and integrating Snowflake's authentication to AzureAD SSO, allowing AIR MILES  to focus on the core of their project and avoid common setup pitfalls that Infostrux's certified experts are used to handling very well.

Next, the DataPod team established a live data pipeline between AWS and Snowflake. The data pipeline was built on top of AWS services,  leveraging S3 as an ingest stage for Databricks Delta Lake and custom data pipelines using AWS serverless Lambda functions for ingesting data from the data lake and partner-uploaded data.

After completing some of this cleanup, Infostrux jumped in to establish a Data Clean Room. This new data-sharing mechanism would become a differentiated revenue stream for the organization that has been coined as the "data exchange." 

Data Exchange - System Diagrams_white

As an additional project, the team migrated Tableau dashboards to Looker for their customer-facing applications.

Once we established the Data Clean Room-based product, Infostrux collaborated with AIR MILES to help support their associated go-to-market motion. As prospective customers need to understand the inherent value of AIR MILES' dataset before investing in integration to the data product, Infostrux is providing AIR MILES' and its prospective data partners with their Data Overlap Analysis service. This service allows two organizations to understand the potential business value of their respective datasets, as made accessible through a Data Clean Room. It enables the value conversation securely and without requiring extensive investment from either party.

List key metrics/achieved goals resulting from their data project

  • Data Sharing provides fast, secure, and scalable access to enhanced customer data for Partners.

  • Flow allows us to easily share granular or aggregated data sets with Partners through sub-accounts on top of Snowflake.

  • Cost-effective, managed environments to help serve various types of clients - easy to spin up new accounts and enable shares.

  • Easier integration with Partners via BI tool of choice, resulting in faster speed to insights. Partners spend 3X less time generating insights using shared data.

  • Automated delivery of fresher, more relevant data, resulting in over 90% time savings for analysts.

  • Increased data governance, security, and management via Snowflake platform integrated with Auth0 access management.
Cedric Abali-frame
Cedric Abali - Director of Data Products

“Infostrux has been a trusted partner in helping us develop a strong product strategy and go-to-market plan for our data sharing and exchange product. They also provided leadership and collaboration with our technical teams in developing and delivering a strong data sharing and exchange product to our retail and CPG partner, thereby improving our ability to do data collaboration.”

List key metrics/achieved goals resulting from their data project

  • Data Sharing provides fast, secure, and scalable access to enhanced customer data for Partners.

  • Flow allows us to easily share granular or aggregated data sets with Partners through sub-accounts on top of Snowflake.

  • Cost-effective, managed environments to help serve various types of clients - easy to spin up new accounts and enable shares.

  • Easier integration with Partners via BI tool of choice, resulting in faster speed to insights. Partners spend 3X less time generating insights using shared data.

  • Automated delivery of fresher, more relevant data, resulting in over 90% time savings for analysts.

  • Increased data governance, security, and management via Snowflake platform integrated with Auth0 access management.
Cedric Abali-frame
Cedric Abali - Director of Data Products

“Infostrux has been a trusted partner in helping us develop a strong product strategy and go-to-market plan for our data sharing and exchange product. They also provided leadership and collaboration with our technical teams in developing and delivering a strong data sharing and exchange product to our retail and CPG partner, thereby improving our ability to do data collaboration.”

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