Business Driver

As a retail company, the client was reliant on exports to do their weekly reporting. This leads to confusion in metric definitions and multiple versions of the truth as well as an excessive amount of manual effort. To achieve the required reporting, strengthen data security, and improve analytics and visualizations, KPI Partners performed a key integration between Tableau and Azure which provide a comprehensive business intelligence solution that helped to turn Williams-Sonoma sales data into actionable insights.

KPI Retail Analytics made it possible for Williams Sonoma to gain the benefits of centralized data and eliminating manual effort.

KPI Cloud Analytics - Logical Architecture

Project Summary

KPI Retail Analytics is putting data in the hands of business users for more agility and transparency and a self-service approach with IT governance to ensure data is trustworthy.

KPI uses Microsoft Azure services such as SQL Data Warehouse, and SQL Database which allow client to deploy at scale and with elasticity while allowing IT to maintain data integrity and governance. Tableau provides a fast and scalable enterprise analytics platform for the Azure data services which enables client to analyze and share their data. KPI created a data warehouse that leverages data from many sources to allow ease of data blending (such as store traffic data to demand to map)

By hosting the reporting environment, KPI enables the client to focus on growing its business instead of data validation, security, and infrastructure maintenance.

Results

• Week-End reporting went from an all-day activity to being able to be completed in minutes
• Strengthen system security and improve scalability especially during the data loading process
• KPI provided cost-effective upgraded solutions which eventually reduced maintenance and IT budget
• Daily sales reports help out business users to plan budget
• Product performance reports help business users in decisions making and to improve product sales
• Hosting Tableau server on Premium Storage (SSD) disks improved the report performance
• It provides features, such as automated backups, Point-In-Time Restore, geo-restore, and active geo-replication to increase business continuity
• Query Performance Insight allows to spend less time troubleshooting database performance