BAT announced as the winner of the Malaysia Technology Excellence Award in Analytics – Consumer Products (Non-Durables) category for its enhanced Data & Analytics technologies

BAT accelerates its transformation to build A Better Tomorrow with its newly designed Data & Analytics (D&A) platform across the entire data supply chain, contributing to improved overall work processes.

BAT was named as the award winner for the Analytics – Consumer Products (Non-Durables) category of the Malaysia Technology Excellence Awards 2021 for its agile Data & Analytics (D&A) technologies. As a leading, multi-category consumer goods business in the world, BAT gives importance to the application of D&A technologies in enhancing its information and digital technology functions. In its operations, BAT has emphasised value by providing a differentiated experience whilst delivering incremental financial gains, flexibility by anticipating and addressing evolving business needs, speed by reducing time-to-market period from months to days or even minutes, scale by deploying digital solutions effectively, and innovation in a fast-paced and volatile environment.

In 2019, BAT established its D&A function in Kuala Lumpur. Doing so involved the implementation of new ways of working, such as the design of a people-centred office, new methodologies and the widespread adoption of business experiments with a “fail fast, learn fast” mindset. This new approach emphasised business adoption and data democratisation to enable flexibility and agility in meeting business requirements through continuous collaboration and co-creation with BAT’s business users.

The company’s newly designed D&A platform covered the entire data supply chain from data acquisition to insight-foresight generation and business actions. This new cloud-hosted platform leverages the latest D&A stack, supported by robust technologies. The company applied an “automate-first” approach to maximise the benefits of automation which ultimately promoted a data-driven culture for its 55,000 employees.

BAT worked with Accenture and other key ecosystem partners using world-class innovation to transfer their global D&A operations to Malaysia and in doing so, hopes to inspire other multinationals to follow suite. In carrying this out, BAT recorded the following achievements: (1) building and enabling a reliable and compliant D&A platform in less than 12 months using 12 types of software which covers the entire data supply chain; (2) setting up from scratch a global D&A function with 90% of the team certified in Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprise (SAFe), employing more than 30 data scientists, and hosting 5 virtual events with over 1,500 virtual attendees; (3) obtaining significant business value across various dimensions (i.e. 56 D&A use cases delivered, £22 million total business benefits enabled in 2020, £200,000 run cost savings from the reduction of weeks to hours to deliver data for the business team, and annual savings of 4,000 man-hours).

With a purpose to build A Better Tomorrow, BAT continues to accelerates its transformation by investing in innovative, agile technologies in its operations.

Watch our interview with James Stratford, Head of Data & Analytics - Technology, and know more about their winning project.