From data silos to actionable insights: Innovating within legacy constraints for the digital enterprise
Market View
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Interview with
Iqbal Adjali
HEAD OF ADVANCED ANALYTICS
IMPERIAL BRANDS PLC
about
Iqbal
Adjali
Iqbal Adjali serves as Head of Advanced Analytics at Imperial Brands PLC, bringing over three decades of experience across Biotech, FMCG, Energy, Financial Services, and Telecoms sectors. With a DPhil in Theoretical Physics from Oxford and an MBA from Cranfield, he leads the corporate Advanced Analytics department, driving data-driven decision-making and innovative AI initiatives. His expertise spans building high-performing teams that effectively connect data science with business strategy to achieve corporate objectives.
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We've developed internal tools that enable sophisticated geographical analyses, letting us identify and profile our customer base at various geographical levels - from broad regions down to specific towns, cities, or postal codes.
How is your organisation approaching data integration while working with legacy systems?
Like many large companies, we're navigating the complex journey of migrating to a cloud platform while maintaining our legacy systems. We're taking an incremental approach, implementing a hybrid model that carefully bridges our established systems with new cloud infrastructure. Our ultimate goal is consolidation into a single data platform, which will serve as our comprehensive repository and definitive source for all data requirements across the organisation.
The transformation is extensive and resource-intensive, requiring a methodical, region-by-region approach to implementation. This measured pace is necessary given our historical business model where each region operated independently with its own IT infrastructure. Currently, we're prioritising the integration of critical data while maintaining integration links with various local data assets until they can be fully incorporated into our central platform.
What's particularly crucial in this journey is having a robust data governance framework in place. This foundation is essential for tackling the challenges of data quality, harmonisation, and security across our various systems. By leveraging flexible and scalable cloud-based technologies, we are building towards our enterprise architecture goals in a way that aligns with the organisation's long-term vision.
What successes have you achieved in enriching data across various market functions?
One of our most significant achievements has been enhancing our customer database with detailed address information, effectively adding a sophisticated location dimension to our global customer database. This has transformed our analytical capabilities, allowing us to move beyond broad country-level or regional-level aggregations to conduct precise analyses down to the individual customer level.
We've developed internal tools that enable sophisticated geographical analyses, letting us identify and profile our customer base at various geographical levels - from broad regions down to specific towns, cities, or postal codes. This granular approach has opened up entirely new possibilities for customer insights and targeting. The initiative, while labour-intensive, has provided comprehensive spatial data coverage across our global footprint, becoming a cornerstone of our enterprise platform's capabilities.
Across the organisation, different functions are at varying stages of advancement in their data capabilities. This reflects our strategic approach to prioritising resources and initiatives based on specific business needs and organisational objectives.
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The initiative, while labour-intensive, has provided comprehensive spatial data coverage across our global footprint, becoming a cornerstone of our enterprise platform's capabilities.
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We're taking a comprehensive approach to data integration through our centralised data platform. Beyond our core internal datasets, we are systematically incorporating various external data sources, including key market indicators and consumer research insights.
How are you leveraging external data sources to enhance your market analysis?
We're taking a comprehensive approach to data integration through our centralised data platform. Beyond our core internal datasets, we are systematically incorporating various external data sources, including key market indicators and consumer research insights. We collaborate with a variety of data providers and also commission specialised research to enhance our understanding of the markets we operate in.
However, we encounter significant regional variations in data availability. While some markets offer robust and multi-dimensional datasets, others present more limited data resources in certain areas. This variation requires us to adopt flexible and innovative strategies tailored to the specific challenges and opportunities of each region.
We’re predominantly a business-to-business organisation, but we also have a growing e-commerce presence that is enabling us to explore direct-to-consumer opportunities alongside our traditional B2B focus.
What role do you see for AI, particularly generative AI, in your future operations?
Generative AI and other advanced AI technologies hold significant potential for transforming operations within the FMCG sector. By leveraging AI, companies like ours can enhance their processes, improve decision-making, and foster innovation across multiple areas. For example, AI-driven tools can support demand forecasting by analysing historical sales data, market trends, and external factors to predict consumer demand more accurately, leading to better inventory management and reduced inefficiencies. AI also plays a key role in optimising supply chains, enabling more efficient route planning, inventory management, and cost-saving strategies, which together drive improved operational performance.
To fully harness these opportunities, FMCG companies must focus on scalable data infrastructure capable of supporting these advanced applications. Equally important is the upskilling of teams to ensure they are equipped to work effectively with AI tools and integrate them seamlessly into existing workflows. By aligning infrastructure and capability-building efforts, companies can position themselves to unlock the full potential of AI technologies in a competitive and rapidly evolving marketplace.
How are you preparing your teams for this data-driven future?
Upskilling our analytics workforce is a critical priority for us, particularly as we continue to evolve our data infrastructure and capabilities. On the technical side, we're focusing on cloud-based technologies and tools, as more companies migrate onto hybrid or full cloud-based infrastructure. These are specialised skills that many data engineers, analysts, and data scientists haven't traditionally worked with, so there's definitely a need to build expertise in these areas.
From an analytics and insights perspective, working with new AI technologies, generative AI, and large language models requires highly specialised knowledge within data science. Our advanced analytics teams need to develop skills in building, training, and validating these algorithms. We're seeing the need to upskill everyone across the entire data pipeline, from cloud-based infrastructure through to the development of specific use cases using generative AI tools.
Equally important is the ability to communicate insights effectively. To this end, we’re investing in data visualisation capabilities, which we see as an essential component of the end-to-end pipeline for deriving insights and value from data. By using tools that enable the creation of intuitive dashboards and visual representations of data, we are making insights more accessible and actionable for stakeholders across the organisation. This holistic approach ensures that our teams are not only equipped with the technical skills to handle data but also empowered to drive meaningful business impact.
about
Imperial Brands
PLC
Imperial Brands PLC is a global consumer goods company headquartered in Bristol, UK. With operations in over 120 markets worldwide, the company is known for cigarette brands including Winston and Davidoff. In recent years, Imperial Brands has been transforming its business model, expanding into next-generation products while maintaining its position in the traditional tobacco market. The company emphasises data-driven decision-making and technological innovation to stay competitive in a rapidly evolving industry.
We are the global market leader in geographic information system (GIS) software, location intelligence, and mapping.
Esri UK is the exclusive provider of Esri solutions in the UK. We take a geographic approach to problem-solving, brought to life by modern GIS technology. We are committed to using science and technology to build a sustainable world.
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