Toolstation’s Approach to Modern Data Streaming in the Cloud

Purchased by British builders’ merchant and home improvement retailer Travis Perkins in 2014, Toolstation is a omnichannel retailer of building tools and materials with more than 500 branches in the U.K.—plus over 100 in the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. As such, Toolstation’s IT team is something of an anomaly: a small, agile team ensconced in a bigger,more traditional organization.

Even as the IT team has grown and become more structured over the last few years, Head of Architecture Stuart McGrogan says, “We’re still architects with a small ‘a.’ We’re pragmatic and delivery-focused—not so much a blue-sky-thinking sort of enterprise.”

To support a hands-on style of progress, achieve rapid, steady growth, and to address limitations with the click-and-collect shopping in their stores (60 click-and-collect orders per branch/store per day), the IT team aimed to replace the legacy batch processing infrastructure, solve for technical debt, and remove silos between departments. There’s an ambitious roadmap in place to become fully cloud native, with a modern tech stack, by 2023. An enormous factor in that evolution is the ability to put data in motion with Confluent’s data streaming platform so the organization can take full advantage of an event-driven architecture.