“Having the ability to see our data in real-time and drill into product trends for insight - has transformed our business.””
The CEO uttered these words after just a week of using the business analytics solution delivered by Fulton Analytics.
For this Minneapolis based consumer goods retail company, speed to insights and analyzing product trends are vital to sustained growth. This niche retailer’s significant year-over-year growth has landed them on the shelves of Target, CVS and Duluth Trading Company. As the company prepared to roll out a new ERP System – the company approached Fulton Analytics about architecting a custom analytics solution with real-time reports and interactive self-service capabilities to help scale a widely growing brand of high-quality products.
Start Small & Add Value
Fulton Analytics, a trusted Microsoft Partner, built a small pilot solution using Power BI. During the first few weeks our team gathered requirements, built Power BI prototypes, and spent time understanding the intricate nature of the business. While the ERP migration altered the data model, the understanding of business requirements, business process and critical metrics prepared our team of architects to deliver immediate value while building an end-to-end solution.
Technology Challenge
Fulton Analytics explored multiple light-weight architecture options that would ingest the ERP data and seamlessly deliver it back to the business. With a small IT staff, the company needed a cloud-based architecture that could produce the quick speed to insight and enable a self-service analytics culture.
Our solution landed the data in an Azure Data Lake and used Dataflows to pipe the data into Power BI. This provided a low-cost solution designed to give agility and scalability to a rapidly growing business. Power BI, the Gartner Leader among BI tools, also gives the company the ability to integrate with other business applications like Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, PowerApps and the rest of Microsoft’s Power Platform.
““Communication and transparency were vital to working through these data issues and producing a solution with 99.9% data quality.””
Agile Analytics Success
An ERP migration is demanding and challenged our team to communicate at a higher-level with the client. Our agile framework to deliver business analytics allowed us to deliver precision results over a series of short sprints. Combining data formats and field names from two different ERP systems posed a significant challenge. High touch communication enabled us to work through issues around data quality, data cleanliness and data literacy. Communication and transparency were vital to working through these data issues and producing a solution with 99% data quality.
End Results
Speed to insight and product trend analyze were vital to sustained success. Fulton Analytics responded by deploying an agile analytics solution just in time for the Holiday season, the busiest time of year. The analytics solution provided insights to core metrics just ahead of the Holiday rush:
Sales growth filter by product, customer and channel
Forecast sales and revenue against predefined goals
Identify real-time product trends among its retail partners
Drill into performance by sales reps and uncover best practices
Power BI mobile and Power BI alerting capabilities
Data Driven businesses will continue to thrive in 2020 – and this Minneapolis based retailer has the foundation to move from descriptive business analytics to prescriptive analytics and action toward continued business transformation. Whiteboard a custom Power BI solution for your team with our team of architects.
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Robert Gerads is CEO of Fulton Analytics, a data analytics strategy and consulting firm based in St. Paul, MN. He is also the founder of the Twin Cities Power BI Meetup.