7-Eleven’s newly formed merchant insights team was working across more than 13,000 stores and a mix of franchise and corporate operations, with hundreds of existing reports that used inconsistent definitions for the same metrics. It could take two to three weeks after a sales period closed for merchants to see how they had actually performed, long after pricing and promotion decisions had already been made.

Lovelytics partnered with 7-Eleven’s merchant team to build a governed data foundation: standardized reporting, a gross profit margin dashboard down to the brand and SKU level, and a single, documented set of metric definitions in Unity Catalog. The result was a mid-month view accurate to within 90 to 95% of the true number, fast enough for merchants to actually act on.

7-Eleven runs more than 13,000 stores across a complex mix of corporate and franchise ownership, which means an enormous amount of data: down to the specific cash register, time of day, and item scanned.

But that scale had become the company’s biggest reporting problem rather than its biggest advantage. Merchants had hundreds of dashboards and reports at their disposal and still struggled to find a straight answer, because different teams used different definitions for the same numbers.

To close that gap, 7-Eleven stood up a new merchant insights team and brought in Lovelytics to give that team the tools to connect fragmented data sources and turn them into decisions. Workshops, stakeholder interviews, and merchant surveys helped narrow a long list of possible starting points down to two priorities: a merchant foundational dashboard, and a gross profit margin dashboard that would finally show merchants their profitability down to the brand and SKU level, visibility they had never had before.

The stakes were real. Under the old process, a period that closed in August wouldn’t be visible to merchants until the third week of September, by which point the promotions and pricing calls tied to that period were long since made.

Lovelytics worked closely with 7-Eleven’s finance and merchant analytics teams to build a mid-month view that landed within 90 to 95% of the true number, directionally accurate enough to inform real decisions instead of just documenting what had already happened.

Building the Foundation

Merchant & Gross Profit Reporting. Lovelytics built four foundational reports and two executive-level summaries covering merchant performance and gross profit, giving 7-Eleven’s newly formed merchant insights team, and the merchants they support, a single, trusted place to work from.

Metrics Standardization & Governance. The team documented more than 150 merchant-specific metrics in Unity Catalog, defining clear ownership and eliminating confusion between similar-sounding terms like “merchant gross profit” and “financial gross profit.”

Use Case Roadmap. Lovelytics worked with 7-Eleven to identify, rank, and sequence future use cases by their impact on sales, profit, and efficiency, giving the merchant team a prioritized roadmap for continuous improvement beyond the initial engagement.

Databricks Partnership. Close collaboration with the Databricks team ensured the underlying platform, governance model, and reporting architecture could scale with 7-Eleven’s next set of priorities.

7-Eleven’s business stakeholders didn’t just approve the project, they helped fund what came next. After Lovelytics identified more than $7 million in potential value from a single use case, giving merchants the insight to negotiate more effectively with key suppliers, the business chose to fund the following phase of work directly rather than route it through a standard IT budget.

That kind of trust came from the team’s ability to translate data work into a business case leadership could act on, and from a close working partnership with Databricks that gave 7-Eleven confidence in the underlying platform.

Not every part of the engagement went exactly to plan, and the team came away with lessons worth carrying into future work.

Fragmentation, not volume, was the real problem. 7-Eleven had transaction-level data down to the register and the minute, more granular detail than most companies ever generate. The real constraint was never a lack of information, it was that no one could pull it together fast enough to use it.

Data ownership has to sit with the business. Asking merchant teams, rather than IT, to own metric definitions was a bigger cultural shift than the technical build. The team focused on minimizing the day-to-day burden of that ownership so the change would actually stick.

Value has to be built together, not handed off. Asking stakeholders to define ROI in the abstract didn’t work well. Showing them what a couple of key supplier relationships alone could unlock did, and that became the template for how the team builds business cases going forward.

Scope discipline matters as much as scope definition. The engagement grew well beyond its original footprint over the course of the project, a lesson the team has carried into how future engagements are scoped and managed from day one.

Over roughly four months, spanning September through the turn of the year, 7-Eleven’s merchant teams went from hundreds of disconnected reports to a governed, trusted data foundation. Merchants could finally see profitability down to the SKU level in time to act on it, and the business case Lovelytics built was compelling enough that 7-Eleven chose to fund the next phase of work itself.

• $7M+ in incremental value identified from a single use case, the business was willing to fund.
• 150+ merchant-specific metrics standardized and documented in Unity Catalog, giving 7-Eleven a shared language and clear data ownership for the first time.
• A 2-3 week reporting lag replaced with a mid-month view accurate to within 90-95% of the true number.
• Six dashboards spanning 16 pages delivered, well beyond the original scope of two dashboards and 6-10 reports.
• An estimated $300K in annual savings from consolidating monitoring tooling as part of the broader governance work.

The trust built during this engagement has carried forward. Lovelytics and 7-Eleven’s Databricks partner team have reconnected on a new data governance engagement, and the two organizations are also scoping a second phase of merchandising work focused on vendor performance and merchant insights, building directly on the foundation laid here.