Leveraging KPI Retail Analytics on Azure and Tableau to provide quicker and more meaningful retail reporting
About Williams-Sonoma, Inc.
Williams-Sonoma, Inc. is a specialty retailer of high quality products for the home with $4.4 billion revenue. These products, representing eight distinct merchandise strategies—Cookware, tools, electrics, cutlery, tabletop and bar, outdoor, furniture —are marketed through seven e-commerce websites, eight direct mail catalogs and 600+ stores in 44 US states and 10 countries.
Customer Need / Business Driver
As a retail company Williams-Sonoma was reliant exports to do their weekly reporting. This lead to confusion in metric definitions and multiple versions of truth as well as an excessive amount of manual effort. To achieve the required reporting, strengthen data security and to 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 use Microsoft Azure services such as SQL Data Warehouse, and SQL Database which allow Williams-Sonama 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 Williams-Sonoma 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 mapping)
By hosting the reporting environment, KPI enables Williams-Sonoma to focus on growing their 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 specially 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
