Transforming Retail Data Governance: Groupement Mousquetaires' Journey with Unity Catalog

With more than 4,300 stores across France, Belgium, Portugal, and Poland, Groupement Mousquetaires is one of France's leading retail groups, with a diverse portfolio that includes grocery chains, home improvement stores, and automotive service centers.

La Stime, our Information Systems Department, is critical in supporting every step of the customer journey-from store operations and logistics to supplier performance. Within La Stime, the DataLab team drives our data strategy and implementation, turning information into actionable insights that inform key business decisions.

As early adopters of data-driven decision-making, we launched our centralized DataHub in 2019. This initiative aimed to unify customer data into a 360° view, enable cross-brand research and development, and power smarter operations and decisions.

At the core of DataHub is Databricks. Its comprehensive Data Intelligence Platform has strengthened data governance across our evolving ecosystem. With Unity Catalog, our teams can now unlock the full value of our data, driving revenue and innovation.

The challenges of decentralized data

Before adopting Unity Catalog, we faced significant challenges managing data at scale. With nearly 700 Databricks workspaces, our complex environment required manual management of user access and permissions in each workspace-a time-consuming process that was unsustainable in the long run.

This decentralized approach made it difficult to offer self-service access to trusted "gold data" without sacrificing oversight or slowing teams down. Finding the right data, applying consistent security policies, and enabling cross-team collaboration became increasingly difficult. Without a unified governance framework, data usage varied widely and was hard to control.

Complying with data protection standards, like Règlement Général sur la Protection (RGPD)-the French equivalent of the GDPR-was particularly challenging during development and testing, where the lack of centralized controls introduced compliance risks.

Although we had already adopted Unity Catalog for new data products, we quickly realized that migrating our existing workloads was essential. It felt like a massive undertaking, but it promised to streamline access, improve governance and position us for sustainable growth.

Rebuilding data governance with a trusted partnership

In retail, timing is everything. Think about it - targeted promotions, inventory updates, social media marketing trends and customer sentiment. Everything can change in the blink of an eye. That's why retailers need reliable, accessible data. Ultimately, this necessity drove us to rethink how we manage and govern data across Groupement Mousquetaires' family of brands.

We started by taking stock of where we were-a deep dive into our existing architecture. With hundreds of Databricks workspaces in use across brands, countries and teams, our data landscape became increasingly complex and difficult to oversee and manage. From our store operators and supply chain analysts to our e-commerce team, everyone needed access to data. Yet, getting that access securely and consistently was a major roadblock.