Empowering Retail Through Applied Machine Learning

They call it 'building a plane while flying it.' See how ALDI SOUTH launched a new ML-powered supply chain in only nine months.

#1about 1 minute

Understanding ALDI SOUTH's global retail operations

An overview of ALDI SOUTH's business, including its presence in 11 countries, 6,900 stores, and significant growth in the US market.

#2about 3 minutes

Building a data-driven culture with ALDI Data & Analytics

ALDI is investing heavily in its data and analytics unit (IDA) to leverage vast amounts of store data and create business value.

#3about 4 minutes

Core components and satellite architecture of the data lake

The cloud data lake is built on a simplified set of components like Spark and blob storage, using a satellite concept to isolate team resources and prevent the "noisy neighbor" problem.

#4about 3 minutes

Implementing a medallion architecture and data exchange patterns

Data is processed through bronze, silver, and gold layers to ensure quality and add business context, with a core system managing data exchange between satellites.

#5about 4 minutes

Understanding the business lifecycle of ALDI's special buys

The end-to-end process for "special buys" involves a year-long cycle of forecasting, ordering, allocating to regions and stores, and managing markdowns.

#6about 4 minutes

Applying the satellite architecture to the special buys use case

A dedicated data satellite prepares shared sales data, which is then consumed by separate use case satellites for ordering, allocation, and markdown models.

#7about 1 minute

Overview of the data and machine learning tech stack

The technical stack includes an orchestrator, GitLab for CI/CD, PySpark for distributed data processing, and MLflow for experiment tracking and model serving.

#8about 2 minutes

Fostering an agile culture and hiring data talent

ALDI is rapidly expanding its data teams, hiring for roles like data engineers and scientists within an agile environment to quickly deliver and roll out new solutions.