Tech Stack: Azure Data Factory, Azure Copy, Azure SQL Database, Azure Data Lake Analytics, Power BI

About the Client

Our client is an Australian teahouse chain with over 70 stores around the country and over 1,000 stores worldwide. Due to their success with the increase in the number of stores, getting a 360-degree view of all business functions had become a challenge. The client wanted to cut down its infrastructure setup and maintenance cost.

Background

Our client faced challenges with the colossal task of managing over 1,000 stores worldwide, making it difficult to analyze sales operations, customer behavior, operations reports, labor costs, and other factors. All these business components amounted to over two terabytes worth of accumulated data from all of our client’s stores.

Our client was using an on-premises BI solution to monitor and manage sales and operations of these stores. Running their business effectively had become a challenge because of many issues, including huge downtimes to generate reports, many data silos and disparate sources of data, and inadequate support of their existing BI solution. Further complicated the problem was the fact that each report generated provided only a single dimensional view of sales, labor, discounts, and other related areas.

A high-performance, cloud-based BI platform was required to gather incremental data of about 250 gigabytes per year, process it, and improve scalability.

Our Approach

AArete’s answer to our client’s problem was a flexible cloud-based platform. This platform could enable easy access to sales reports, cut down on downtime, and generate intuitive multi-dimensional reports for smarter and faster decision making. Unlike on-premises solutions, data encryption is native to the cloud and requires no third-party add-on applications, ensuring high data security.

How It Works

At first, data from various sources like point of sales systems, inventory, finance, human resources, and social media is made available for integration. These data records are then processed, aggregated, and presented in the reports by the platform.

The structured and semi-structured data from sources like POS systems, HR, finance, and inventory, and unstructured data from social media is stored in Blobs. It is then processed and transformed in Azure Data Factory through Azure Data Lake Analytics in a structured format and stored in Azure Blob Storage. This transformed data is then pushed to Azure SQL Database using Azure Copy. This processed data is then pulled via Power BI for intuitive report generation that can be accessed via a web application.

The Result

Our platform resolves infrastructure scalability and security issues, provides intuitive multi-dimensional reports and eliminates downtime for the client. Other benefits include:

• A low-cost, plug-n-play solution for comprehensive analysis and actionable insights
• Store large volumes (2TB) of data and ability to populate data in almost real time on dashboards
• Real-time business insights to boost sales and optimize operational & functional costs
• Provide a 360-degree view of the business in a single platform
• Reduce infrastructure setup and maintenance costs by 90%