Case Study: Toolstation achieves real-time inventory and faster click-and-collect with Confluent

Toolstation’s Approach to Modern Data Streaming in the Cloud

Toolstation, a UK omnichannel retailer with 500+ branches, faced severe limits from a legacy batch-processing architecture that left inventory out of sync, capped stores at viewing 60 click-and-collect orders, and strained a small engineering team—especially during the pandemic. To move to an event-driven, cloud-native model, Toolstation adopted Confluent’s data streaming platform (managed Apache Kafka / Confluent Cloud) to replace polling and batch jobs with real-time streams.

Confluent provided a managed Kafka service and Professional Services to lift and shift Toolstation to the cloud and implement real-time event streaming in about six weeks, removing batch runtime risks, enabling real-time stock updates and push notifications, and eliminating the 60-order bottleneck. The Confluent-based solution delivered immediate revenue impact, multicloud/GCP integration, a more cost-effective operating model, and now supports roughly ten production apps as Toolstation migrates workloads from batch to streaming.

Toolstation

Rob Contreras

Technical Architect