As a leading operator of food and beverage outlets in travel locations worldwide, SSP Group, a major operator of food and beverage outlets in travel hubs across the United Kingdom, wanted to leverage its data to support decision-making, drive value and enhance customer experience. This required a modern and scalable enterprise data platform capable of supporting high-volume, near real-time sales and operational reporting across global markets.
Legacy reporting environments and fragmented regional EPOS systems created operational inefficiencies, inconsistent reporting standards, and delays in accessing business-critical insights. SSP partnered with Protiviti to design and implement a cloud-native enterprise data lakehouse architecture on Azure Databricks.
The engagement leveraged an augmented team approach, combining Protiviti’s and SSP’s technical expertise with active business involvement. This collaborative model fostered trust in data, ensured business requirements were met, and optimised delivery without sacrificing operational needs.
“The new enterprise data platform delivers trusted data, safe access, and a global mindset with local adaptability. Our teams now make faster, more informed decisions, supported by a scalable and resilient solution,” said Jon Wood, Chief Digital and Technology Officer for SSP Group.
The programme established a global hub-and-spoke data platform that enabled ingestion and harmonisation of data from multiple EPOS systems across regions worldwide. The platform was designed to operate round the clock, supporting near real-time sales reporting for business users across the global organisation.
The solution provided SSP with:
- A scalable, trusted enterprise data platform supporting a global mindset to data across SSP, while providing for local adaptability across regions.
- Near real-time global sales visibility across international operations, so countries and regions could have access to their data, when needed.
- Standardised and governed data ingestion and transformation processes.
- Improved reporting consistency and operational resilience.
- Enhanced business decision-making through modern Power BI dashboards and governed datasets.
- Self-serve capability for functional analysts across SSP, supporting an increased demand for data-driven decision making.
- A future-ready platform capable of supporting AI, advanced analytics and operational optimisation initiatives.
The business challenge
SSP operates across numerous countries and regions, with multiple EPOS platforms supporting day-to-day retail operations. The existing reporting landscape had evolved organically over time and presented several challenges:
Data was fragmented across regional systems with inconsistent data structures, limited governance capabilities, and no unified architecture to support access to a global view of the data.
Business users experienced delays in accessing sales insights as reporting processes relied heavily on manual intervention and reconciliation.
Existing platforms lacked scalability to support growing reporting and analytics demands, and were constrained to UK time, limiting timely insights across regions.
The organisation required a modern data platform capable of centralising data operations while still supporting regional flexibility and local operational requirements.
In addition, the platform needed to support near continuous operations due to the global nature of SSP’s business, with sales transactions occurring across multiple time zones throughout the day.
Protiviti’s approach
Protiviti partnered closely with SSP’s technical team in an augmented team model and worked with SSP stakeholders across business and technology teams to design and implement a scalable enterprise data platform leveraging Microsoft Azure and Databricks.
The programme focused on:
- Creating a globally scalable hub-and-spoke architecture.
- Standardising ingestion and transformation patterns across regions underpinned by a strong DataOps model.
- Enabling governed and secure data access.
- Delivering near real-time reporting capability for business users.
- Supporting operational resilience and scalability.
This programme exemplified an augmented team approach, with business involvement at every stage to build trust in data. We optimised costs without sacrificing business needs, ensuring delivery aligned with operational priorities
“This programme demonstrated how a modern data platform can fundamentally transform the speed, quality and accessibility of enterprise insights. By building a scalable and governed global data foundation on Databricks, SSP is now positioned to make faster business decisions, improve operational visibility, and accelerate future AI and analytics initiatives,” said Nikunj Chadha, Protiviti UK’s Managing Director and Practice Lead for Data and AI.
Delivering enterprise-scale reporting and analytics
The implementation of the Databricks enterprise data platform delivered measurable operational and strategic benefits for SSP. The result is a trusted global data asset, widely adopted across regions. Local teams are accelerating platform adoption, supporting analytics, AI proof-of-values and self-serve capabilities. The platform continues to evolve, with an analytics data layer and a data champions programme driving further value.
Key outcomes
Near real-time global reporting
Business users across regions gained access to near real-time sales reporting powered by integrated global EPOS data.
This enabled:
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- Faster operational decision-making and responsiveness to operational trends.
- Improved visibility into trading performance.
- Reduced reporting delays and manual intervention.
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Scalable global data foundation
The platform established a modern and scalable enterprise data foundation capable of supporting future growth and transformation initiatives.
The architecture now supports:
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- Additional regional onboarding.
- Expansion into new analytics and AI use cases.
- Advanced operational and commercial insights.
- Unified reporting and advanced analytics into a single, future-ready data platform.
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Improved governance and standardisation
The programme introduced stronger governance and standardisation across data ingestion, transformation and reporting.
This resulted in:
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- Improved data quality and consistency.
- One source of truth for global sales data.
- Reduced operational risk through increased alignment between business and technology teams.
- Greater trust in enterprise reporting.
Operational resilience
The implementation of DataOps and structured support processes improved platform resilience and long-term sustainability.
The global operating model enabled SSP to support continuous business operations across multiple regions and time zones.
Strategic value for SSP
The platform has become a foundational capability supporting SSP’s wider digital and data transformation journey.
By modernising the enterprise data estate, SSP has positioned itself to:
- Accelerate AI and advanced analytics initiatives.
- Improve customer and operational insights.
- Support enterprise-wide reporting consistency.
- Scale analytics capabilities globally.
- Enable data-driven decision-making across the organisation.
The programme demonstrated the value of combining scalable cloud-native architecture with strong governance, operational discipline and close business collaboration.
Asheeka Hyde, SSP Group’s Technology Director for Data, Analytics and AI said, “This programme exemplified an augmented team approach, with business involvement at every stage to build trust in data. We optimised costs without sacrificing business needs, ensuring delivery aligned with operational priorities.”
Building the global enterprise data platform
Protiviti and SSP’s data team worked closely together and designed and implemented a modern Azure Databricks Lakehouse architecture that centralised ingestion, transformation, governance and reporting capabilities.
The architecture leveraged a hub-and-spoke model to support both global consistency and regional operational flexibility.
Core components of the solution
Azure Databricks lakehouse platform
The central platform was built on Azure Databricks and incorporated:
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- Multi-layered data architecture comprising Landing, Bronze, Silver and Gold data layers.
- Metadata-driven ingestion frameworks to enable reusable pipelines.
- Modern Databricks solutions such as Delta Live Tables
- Scalable transformation and orchestration frameworks.
- Incremental CDC-based ingestion and historical data processing.
- Secure and governed access controls through Unity Catalog.
- Enterprise-grade monitoring and operational support.
Global EPOS data integration
Protiviti and SSP’s data team also established secure connectivity and ingestion pipelines to integrate data from multiple regional EPOS systems globally.
The solution enabled:
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- Automated ingestion from multiple data sources and regions.
- Standardised transformation and harmonisation processes.
- Low-latency data availability for reporting and analytics.
- Future-ready onboarding of additional regions and systems.
The platform was designed to ingest millions of records daily into the data lakehouse, delivering highly optimised analytical capabilities across billions of historical transactions.
Regional hub-and-spoke operating model
Regional spokes were implemented to support local reporting and operational needs while maintaining governance and alignment with the global enterprise platform.
This approach enabled:
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- Regional flexibility with central governance.
- Standardised KPI and reporting definitions.
- Improved scalability and operational resilience.
- Simplified onboarding of future regions and capabilities.
Power BI reporting modernisation
Protiviti and SSP’s data team also modernised SSP’s reporting estate by redesigning Power BI workspaces, datasets, and dashboards.
The new reporting environment provided:
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- Near real-time and intraday sales reporting.
- Enhanced sales visibility.
- Improved executive and operational dashboards.
- Faster access to trusted business insights.
- Scalable and governed semantic models.
Governance and DataOps
A key focus of the programme was establishing operational sustainability and governance.
Protiviti and SSP’s data team implemented DataOps practices and governance controls to support:
- Proactive monitoring and operational support.
- Automated data quality framework and reconciliation processes.
- Secure access management and policy-led data management through Unity Catalog.
- Change management and deployment controls.
- Technical documentation and support models with clear ownership.
- Long-term platform scalability and maintainability.
This ensured the platform was not only scalable from a technology perspective, but also operationally sustainable for SSP teams.
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