Ocado Technology realized it needed an enterprise grade business intelligence (BI) tool with a robust semantic layer to ensure consistency in how metrics are defined and used across the organization. The company evaluated Looker and a third-party BI tool. Impressed with how comprehensive and powerful Looker’s semantic layer was, it implemented Looker in 2023 and set about migrating its reports to the platform. 

“Our data gives us a market advantage, but we have to access and process that data effectively,” says Duncan Thompson, Data Ops Lead Analytics at Ocado Technology. “Investing in Looker has proven to be absolutely the right decision for us. It’s a great proposition because it has enabled us to drive consistency across a huge range of metrics we previously had to spend time reconciling manually. It’s a double whammy — we get consistency, and we’re more efficient as we only have to build and define metrics once before we can use them again and again.”

This time-consuming process slowed the team’s ability to improve the partner’s search performance, and also meant the data analyst’s time was taken up answering ad hoc requests, diverting them from higher-value data projects. Now, those product teams can self-serve this information directly from Looker, enabling them to fix the problem faster.

Ocado Technology is also using Looker to produce reports for its retail partners with what it calls OSP Insights. Previously, this capability would have needed to be built from scratch, making the development process slow and expensive. Now, with Looker’s semantic layer, Ocado Technology can take the metric definitions it has already created for its own internal reporting and reuse them to create an external reporting instance to generate reports for its clients. 

Being able to reuse these definitions allowed Ocado Technology to deliver its OSP Insights capability in just three months, when it would have taken more than a year with the third-party BI tool, saving the company months’ worth of development costs. With OSP Insights, Ocado Technology can now give its partners access to reports and insights to analyze the performance of individual components of the OSP, such as warehouse management, supply chains, and last-mile delivery.

Packing bags at an Ocado Technology fulfillment center is a precision operation. Robots moving grocery products glide rapidly around a vast grid, pausing briefly beside robotic picking stations, where robot arms quickly transfer the required products into delivery boxes containing customer shopping bags, before the bots glide swiftly to their next encounter. This meticulous automation is what enables the OSP to pack orders so quickly and efficiently. But to function effectively, it depends on human warehouse staff and automation ensuring prepared delivery boxes are available at all times.  

Before using Looker, Ocado Technology was unable to provide a real-time view of when an extra supply of prepared delivery boxes was required to ensure orders could be picked and packed quickly and dispatched on time.  Now, with Looker, the company can fine-tune how often it refreshes its data, giving it a near-real-time view of the level of prepared delivery boxes available across the warehouse and the rate at which they are being prepared, allowing warehouse staff to keep delivery boxes stocked with bags to ensure the packing process runs as efficiently as possible.  

“Before Looker, near-real-time reporting wouldn't have been an option,” explains Thompson. “We'd have had to deliver it through a software-development process, and it would have taken a couple of months to deliver, instead of the couple of days it took with Looker. Thanks to Looker’s agility, we enabled the warehouse to quickly solve a packing problem that allowed them to achieve their highest site productivity for two weeks.”

The future of Ocado Technology is one of rapid growth. Just a few years ago, the company, on behalf of its retail partners, would open one large automated warehouse every few years. Today, it has sites live all over the world with plans to open many more. That fast expansion is generating ever-increasing amounts of data, which the company is using to further improve its OSP and the services it offers its customers. 

“As we grow, we are constantly innovating,” explains Thompson. “We’re always trying to make our product better, optimize delivery, and achieve more efficient operations with less waste. That all requires data to make the best decisions about how to improve our product, which makes Looker critical to that journey.”