Case Study: John Keells Holdings achieves ML-driven demand forecasting and optimized store operations with Databricks

Optimizing store operations with the customer in mind

John Keells Holdings (JKH) is a diversified Sri Lankan conglomerate operating 70 companies across seven industries and serving millions of customers. OCTAVE, JKH’s Data & Advanced Analytics center, faced fragmented, siloed data that limited its ability to support strategic and operational decisions—especially inventory management, demand forecasting and safety‑stock optimization—so the group sought an Azure‑native platform to centralize data and scale analytics.

Using Azure Databricks with Delta Lake and MLflow, JKH unified pipelines and enabled cross‑team collaboration among data engineers, scientists and analysts on a single platform. A pilot at Keells supermarkets used customer‑behavior clustering to optimize assortments, driving higher dry‑goods revenue and drastically reducing the annual category review time; across the business the platform has shortened ML time‑to‑production and supported dozens of high‑impact use cases.

John Keells Holdings

Yolan Seimon

Vice President