Al Jameela Retail Group is a leading retail conglomerate headquartered in Dubai, managing a wide portfolio of consumer goods and convenience store chains across the UAE. Known for its strong market presence and expansive supply chain, Al Jameela caters to thousands of retailers and independent shop owners through its comprehensive wholesale distribution platform. Their flagship digital platform, JameelaConnect, was built to enable direct engagement between FMCG brands and retail outlets, delivering a seamless ordering, fulfillment, and inventory experience to over 80,000 retail partners.
Despite the success of JameelaConnect in simplifying wholesale transactions, the company's data infrastructure was proving to be a bottleneck. The existing system couldn't keep up with the pace of operations or the growing demand for real-time insights. Reports often took days to generate, hampering quick decision-making and leaving potential sales opportunities untapped.
According to Head of Data & Analytics at Al Jameela, "We had a goldmine of customer and product data, but we weren't extracting the value we needed. Our teams couldn't make decisions fast enough because the data simply wasn't available in time."
Their legacy ERP system—centered on an aging SAP deployment—was functional for order processing, but lacked modern capabilities like real-time change data capture. As a result, data extraction and transformation had to be done manually. This slowed down reporting cycles and prevented the business from responding to fluctuations in stock levels, customer behavior, and market trends.
To address these pain points, Al Jameela Retail Group partnered with AWS and Ancrew Global, a trusted AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, to overhaul their data architecture. The collaboration focused on designing a scalable, cloud-native data lake that could deliver real-time insights and support advanced analytics at scale.
The new solution consolidated 15 disparate data sources into a centralized Amazon S3 data lake. From there, data is streamed and transformed using real-time ingestion tools, and made available for immediate querying through Amazon Redshift. This new environment allows the Al Jameela team to run predictive analytics, create live dashboards, and significantly reduce the time it takes to generate operational reports—from three days down to under an hour.
With a modern data foundation in place, Al Jameela now captures hourly updates across its ecosystem—including sales performance, delivery tracking, inventory levels, and payment status. This new visibility has empowered the business to proactively identify trends, enable cross-selling and upselling strategies, and guide FMCG brands on how to optimize their retail presence.
For example, during periods of high demand—such as religious holidays or national events—the company can now forecast product surges and adjust stock distribution accordingly. The same infrastructure helped them weather unexpected spikes in consumer demand during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Throughout the project, Ancrew Global played a strategic role in aligning the technology transformation with Al Jameela's broader business objectives. By prioritizing outcome-driven development and scalable architecture, they ensured that the data lake not only supported current use cases but would also accommodate future growth.
"Ancrew Global brought a deep understanding of AWS services and a real commitment to solving our business challenges—not just delivering a technical solution," said Sara Al Mahri. "They worked hand-in-hand with our teams, helping us think beyond IT and focus on unlocking new value through data."
With this transformation, Al Jameela Retail Group has laid the groundwork for a more responsive, data-informed retail operation. As the platform continues to scale, the company plans to integrate machine learning models for demand forecasting, customer segmentation, and personalized promotions – delivering even greater value to both its retail partners and FMCG brands.
"We're no longer reactive. Thanks to AWS and Ancrew Global, data now drives how we think, plan, and grow our business," concludes Tariq.