Case Study: Gordon Food Service achieves near-real-time business insights with Qlik Data Integration

Gordon Food Service streamlines business intelligence with real-time data

Gordon Food Service, a more than 120-year-old, family-managed foodservice company with 170+ stores and a large distribution and delivery network, faced a growing data-management problem: operational data had spread from a mainframe to hundreds of Oracle and SQL databases and many cloud SaaS systems, making it hard to consolidate information and act on fresh insights. The company needed a single, cloud-based platform to free data from silos and deliver near real-time analytics for faster, data-driven decisions.

Gordon chose Google Cloud Platform and Qlik Data Integration (Qlik Replicate) to stream data from 11 sources—including SAP, SQL Server and Oracle—into BigQuery, Oracle and Kafka. The pipeline now handles ~12.7 TB across 929 tables (about 4,000 replicated objects), covers 98% of sources with sub-second latency for many feeds, and can add new sources in under a day. As a result, teams that once waited days or weeks can answer questions in minutes, sales and CRM workflows receive real-time alerts, and operations use near-real-time data to optimize logistics.

Gordon Food Service

Eric Patterson

Senior Business Analyst – Sales