ICA Gruppen enhances business intelligence by democratizing data on MongoDB

THEIR CHALLENGE

Using MongoDB Atlas to optimize the developer experience

With 1,400 physical stores, 450 e-commerce stores, and five e-commerce teams, ICA Gruppen is one of Sweden’s leading online grocery retailers. As such, the company’s requirements are clear cut when it comes to a database solution. “Fundamentally, we need to be able to store data efficiently, and we need to be able to access it flexibly from multiple different perspectives,” explained Egil Sonesson, Tech Lead and Integration Architect at ICA Gruppen. The e-commerce platform processes thousands of orders daily, generating diverse, high-volume, real-time data, from product numbers to payment-related information, address details, and delivery schedules. The retailer collects and analyzes all these data points to offer promotions, recommendations and business insights.

ICA Gruppen’s legacy document database system, while functional, presented some challenges. The system lacked certain functions necessary for development speed and efficiency, often requiring ICA Gruppen’s 20 developers to perform workarounds due to its limited compliance with MongoDB standards. This gap was pronounced, given the overwhelming resources and community support available for MongoDB, which ICA Gruppen’s legacy system couldn’t fully use. Issues with tooling, such as monitoring and index management, further complicated the system.

“When, as a development team, you’re looking to solve a problem, that search will always point to a MongoDB solution,” said Sonesson. This is why ICA Gruppen embarked on a migration journey from its legacy system to MongoDB Atlas. “The trade was paying a little more to save a lot on development hours,” explained Sonesson. “That was the business case—it was a no-brainer.”

OUR SOLUTION

Migrating data quickly to a fast and flexible alternative

ICA Gruppen set up the MongoDB database by directly replicating its existing version. The team then wrote updates to both the original and the new systems simultaneously. In under a month, the migration was complete, enabling the team to quickly use the improved query performance of the new system. MongoDB provided minimal support during the migration, simply because it wasn’t required. “We had a few pointers, but we didn’t really need help,” said Sonesson. “That’s one of the best benefits of MongoDB Atlas—it’s so easy to understand.”

ICA Gruppen now uses MongoDB Atlas as an operational data layer (ODL). As a result, data flowing through in real time is temporarily stored, and the company can retrieve it later for specific uses. By serving as an intermediary, this layer plays a critical role in offloading the workloads from source systems. Now, instead of users needing to query the source systems directly—which could overwhelm the systems with excessive requests—the ODL provides a centralized platform where source systems publish their data. This ensures better system performance and data availability for downstream processes.

The retailer is now using MongoDB extensively to process intermediate data. For instance, when the company collects receipts and related data, the system ensures that the information is available in real time. Reliance on the source systems for data isn’t feasible because these warehouses often lack up-to-date or complete information. Instead, the system enables instant data collection and processing, avoiding the inefficiencies of batch reporting. This real-time capability has become one of the primary use cases for the team.

ICA Gruppen is also using MongoDB Atlas Charts, enabling users to visualize sales data efficiently. For example, it could display a snapshot of yesterday’s sales. Using this straightforward business intelligence tool, users can easily see broken-down and organized data. By using a simple link, authorized users can access and share the information directly without the need to generate or send reports manually.

“MongoDB is a super stable platform,” Sonesson said. “It’s so easy to manage, we can do what we do best—and that’s development. Plus, having all the benefits of a world-leading platform means we can adapt to change with speed, confidence, and stability.”

OUTCOME

Democratizing data access for enhanced business intelligence

ICA Gruppen has found MongoDB to be flawlessly stable. “It’s been perfect from the start,” stated Sonesson. Admin need has all but disappeared, enabling the team to focus primarily on development speed while ensuring the delivery of critical functionality. “It’s so easy for all our teams to use MongoDB,” said Sonesson. “They don’t have to take care of managing, moving, or backing up anything. It just happens automatically.” What’s more, reliance on tech support has been minimal: “One or two calls,” Sonesson said. “And one of those was for billing.”

From a development perspective, the benefit of moving to MongoDB has been obvious. “It’s a much better DevOps-focused environment,” said Sonesson. Yet, it’s intuitive enough for even nondevelopers to navigate effectively; with prewritten scripts, for example, it’s possible to create new collections in the database in around ten minutes, and “five minutes to put the collection into production,” Sonesson explained. Such streamlined processes enable the team to quickly set up and share their work environment, enhancing productivity and collaboration. Development speed is accelerated and performance enhanced, with at least two major releases achieved since migration—“basically at the click of a button,” according to Sonesson.

ICA Gruppen has also seen enhanced usability in features like charting. Notably, some of these features have been successfully integrated with the company’s access requirements. For instance, users can now log in via the company’s active directory to access tools like MongoDB Atlas Charts directly, saving time and ultimately democratizing data while complying with internal authentication protocols.

With stored data, the ability to respond quickly to complex queries has decreased time to market for the solution. After the system processes data, it provides insights, such as how specific products have performed, fueling business intelligence. For instance, users can determine exactly how much of a particular item, like Christmas ham, was sold in the previous week. “This is what we can do with our MongoDB solution,” said Sonesson. “It’s been very handy to get this kind of niche reports out to the business.”

Plans are now underway to migrate relational and specialized in-memory databases to MongoDB. “The use case is changing a bit,” said Sonesson. “But now, moving into MongoDB, we’ll be fine.”

To learn more, visit MongoDB Atlas Charts.