Designing A Modern Data Mesh Architecture For A Global FMCG Leader
A global FTSE 40 fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company (the client), embarked on a mission to modernise its data landscape as part of a wider enterprise transformation. With operations in more than 120 markets, the client faced increasing challenges from legacy systems, fragmented platforms, and inconsistent data governance.
Over time, the client’s data landscape had become fragmented and siloed, with various lines of business deploying localised data warehouses and analytics platforms. This legacy estate had evolved with inconsistent data standards, disconnected governance, and redundant integrations. The key challenges included:
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Fragmented Ownership and Redundant Platforms
Multiple business units operated their own platforms, leading to duplicated pipelines and analytics inconsistencies.
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Lack of Enterprise Governance and Visibility
Weak metadata standards, manual ETL processes, and limited data quality controls hindered trust in insights.
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Disconnected Data Strategy and Technical Debt
Legacy platforms were not designed to scale for AI, advanced analytics, or real-time operational data needs.
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Under-utilised Investment in Modern Data Platforms
Despite adopting leading analytics platforms, integration into a cohesive enterprise data ecosystem remained incomplete.
Mosaic Island was engaged to help the client define a modern, scalable, and federated enterprise data architecture – paving the way for self-service analytics, responsible AI adoption, and trusted data-driven decision-making across the business.
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Assess the Current State of the client’s data platforms, integration patterns, and business data domains.
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Define a Target Enterprise Data Mesh Architecture leveraging Hub-and-Spoke principles.
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Create a Transition Strategy to uplift existing platforms and retire legacy systems.
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Embed Governance and Engineering Standards for data products, pipelines, and AI use cases.
The work included deep analysis of existing platforms and workflows, technical and business stakeholder engagement, and alignment with the client’s IT strategy and cloud transformation initiatives.
Over the course of the engagement, Mosaic Island delivered:
- A Target Architecture Blueprint
- A Hub-and-Spoke model and Databricks based data mesh to govern data products across domains such as Finance, B2B Sales, and Supply Chain.
- Platform Capability Assessments
- Maturity assessments across key pillars including:
- Data Governance & Quality
- Master Data Management (MDM)
- Ingestion & ETL Pipelines
- Semantic Models & AI Enablement
- Discovery, Catalogue & Marketplace
- Maturity assessments across key pillars including:
- Data Architecture Principles and Patterns
- A set of data principles, a capability model and data patterns, to direct design and delivery activities within the data mesh.
- Data Mesh Operating Model
- A federated data ownership model that enabled local autonomy while maintaining enterprise governance through shared standards and reusable assets.
- Transition Pathways
- Migration strategies for replacing or uplifting legacy data platforms, including:
- Consolidating market-specific SQL Server DWHs
- Migrating analytics workloads to Databricks
- Embedding Zero-Copy sharing via Delta Sharing
- Migration strategies for replacing or uplifting legacy data platforms, including:
- Guidance for Data Use Case Assessment
- A framework to assess analytics and AI workloads for architecture suitability, TCO, value, and time-to-insight.
The assessment produced their enterprise data architecture strategy that defined a clear path to a modern, governed, and scalable enterprise data platform enabling:
- Self-service analytics via a governed data marketplace
- Federated but compliant domain ownership through the Data Mesh
- Real-time operational and strategic insights using Zero Copy access
- AI-ready architecture supporting machine learning models and activated insights
- Improved governance and trust in data and consistent metadata standards
With this new architecture vision, our FMCG client is well-positioned to unlock the full value of its data assets, increase agility across business units, and support intelligent decision-making at scale.
Our FMCG client selected Mosaic Island for our deep expertise in Enterprise Architecture, Data Strategy, and Complex IT Transformation. Our vendor-neutral approach, combined with our practical experience of the Data ecosystem, ensured we could operate across both technical and business domains to deliver an actionable strategy.
Enterprise Architecture, Strategy, Data
