Case Study: Nebraska Furniture Mart achieves cross-team data literacy and faster, trusted decisions with Alation

Nebraska Furniture Mart - Customer Case Study

Nebraska Furniture Mart (NFM), the largest home‑furnishing retailer in North America and part of Berkshire Hathaway, set out to become more data driven but struggled with siloed teams, inconsistent definitions of customers and metrics, and difficulty discovering what data existed or who owned it. To improve decision making across marketing, merchandising, sales and operations, NFM needed a single source of definitions and a place where business users could find and trust the right data.

NFM implemented Alation as a business data catalog to capture metadata, publish context and articles, and enable collaboration across teams. Alation’s open APIs connected to their homegrown ERP and custom metadata repository, providing field‑level lineage, natural‑language search and self‑service access. As a result, silos have been reduced, data literacy has increased, certified data and lineage are easier to find, and teams can deliver faster, more accurate customer impact analyses and business decisions.

Nebraska Furniture Mart

Jeremy Busselman

Analytics Architect