Microsoft BI Strategy Support

You are here

Use case – Planning a journey to data driven decision making

Our client is a retail organisation with a vision of achieving better data driven decision making across the business with a top down approach enabled through engaging, insightful and interactive dashboards.

With an extensive Microsoft based data estate already including an on-premise Dynamics AX deployment and a SQL Server Data Warehouse, and a suite of SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) reports consuming data from the data warehouse a Microsoft data platform was an obvious choice. Our client also had a strong desire to migrate from an on-premise data centre to a cloud based data centre.

The objective for a new BI solution was to provide both a self-service BI solution and a suite of purpose designed dashboards. Self-service BI that encouraged the questioning of data, and the use of the data to implement visual story telling to unearth insights into the data and business behaviour (such as seasonal trends, best sellers, promotion success, stock fulfillment patterns, customer patterns) and help drive better business decisions. Purpose built dashboards presenting key performance indicators for senior management enabling them to gain a 360 view of the business and drill down to uncover the stories behind the KPIs.

In addition to the technical solution required to deliver a data driven BI solution our client required help and support in achieving buy in from the business and senior management, and engaging key stakeholders to promote the benefits of interactive, top down visualisation approaches to data anlysis.


Business Requirement

 
Provide a “One Truth” standardized set of key business metrics that can be quickly presented in different contexts to suit different audiences
 
 
Provision of rich, compelling and interactive dashboards
 
 
Provision of a self-service data driven BI solution
 
 
Engage key stakeholders and business partners and promote data driven decision making
 
 
Provide a central, scalable and future-proof solution
 
 
Spend more time analysing data than preparing data in Excel spreadsheets
 
 
Improve the quality of data through a central validated business model
 


The PTR Solution

The solution implemented was built around a Microsoft SQL Database, an Analysis Services Tabular Model, and Power BI.

  • Data Warehouse in SQL Database
  • Semantic Tabular Model using Azure Analysis Services
  • Self-Service Business Intelligence, Reports and Insight using Power BI
  • User engagement sessions to promote benefits, establish needs and encourage data driven thinking and story telling
  • Bite size training sessions to educate key users in how to use the semantic model and build insightful, engaging dashboards
  • Planned migration path to a full Azure Data Platform


The Benefits

  • A single consolidated and clean repository of quality data from Dynamics AX and other adhoc data sources serving as a single source of truth for the organisation
  • Well defined relationships and business hierarchies for full 360 view of sales, stock, stores and promotions.
  • Centralised definition of key business metrics such as “profit”, “margin”, “sales” to ensure consistent, reliable and trustworthy reporting across the whole business.
  • A conformed set of business perspectives, such as product type, time, geography, division, channel, demographic, that can be applied across all data sets as relevant
  • Realtime dashboards accessible from any device, any time, any where
  • Rich, visually engaging and interactive reports enabling users to drill in and out of the detail behind the story and see not just the what, but the why and drive effective insight and decision making
  • A timeline of milestones to fit with infrastructure, budget, resource and future data strategy considerations