A Scalable BI Solution and Customizable Reports for a Food Manufacturer and Distributor

About the Client

The Client is a large food manufacturer and distributor operating across the US.

Growing Data Scattered Across Sources Blocked Enterprise Decision-Making

As the Client's business kept expanding, it became more challenging to analyze the ever-growing volumes of data scattered across multiple on-premises and cloud data sources. The legacy approach to data analytics had many error-prone manual steps and lacked transparency in its data flows. To boost enterprise-wide decision-making, the Client was looking for a reliable technology partner to design and develop a robust BI solution.

A Scalable BI Solution From Data Lake to Power BI

Trusting INNERLUXES's 17 years in BI services and a vast portfolio of success stories in data analytics, the Client turned to INNERLUXES for BI implementation.

BI solution design and planning

INNERLUXES's consultants started with an in-depth investigation of the Client's business needs and expectations. Through a series of meetings with key project stakeholders, a clear concept of a BI solution was created. As a result of the discovery stage, which involved extensive reverse engineering of the legacy system, the Client received:

• An inventory of data sources and existing data management flows.
• A feature set for the BI solution, including data processing and analytics features.
• An architecture design for the solution and its integrations with multiple on-premises and cloud data sources.
• Recommendations on the optimal tech stack for each component.
• A detailed project implementation roadmap with estimated costs, timelines, and resources, as well as a risk mitigation plan.

BI solution development and launch

In six months, INNERLUXES's team (a project manager, a business analyst, three data engineers, and a DevOps specialist) delivered a fully functional BI solution that included the following components:

• A data source layer for internal and external sources (ERPs, SharePoint, internal databases, Excel documents prepared by different departments, Excel reports from distribution partners, etc.).
• A data ingestion layer with easy-to-configure ETL pipelines enabling automated and semi-automated data collection from the sources and scheduled data refreshes.
• A data lake to hold business data in raw format, available for further processing.
• A data warehouse (DWH) to store processed data in a highly structured format ready for analytical queries.
• Three OLAP cubes for regular and ad hoc reporting on enterprise finance metrics, online-store sales, and market data and sales by a major distributor.
• Power BI reports and applications that cover all current analytical needs.

One key advantage of the new BI solution over the legacy system is the ease of data management and report customization. The platform enables greater responsiveness to evolving business needs, significantly reducing the workload on the Client's ICT team. The ICT team can now alter current reports, add new data sources, manage the logic of data transformations and data access rules in a single place, and build reports and analytics processes much faster.

To help the Client achieve high data security, INNERLUXES introduced role-based data access control and data change tracking. Another security feature — an analytics sandbox — was implemented to let the Client's data analysts run safe data experiments without affecting the production environment.

Once the BI solution was launched, INNERLUXES conducted a series of user training sessions and provided the Client with all the required technical documentation. The company is now considering further cooperation with INNERLUXES to upgrade the solution with new functionality.

A Single Source of Truth for Enterprise Decisions in 6 Months

Within six months, the Client received an easy-to-scale BI solution that serves as a single source of truth for business data and drives enterprise decision-making. With INNERLUXES's help, the Client increased the transparency of data flows across the company, improved the consistency and security of business data, and gained new possibilities for safe data experiments.

Technologies and Tools

Microsoft Blob Storage, Microsoft Azure File Share, Microsoft Key Vault, Azure Event Grid, Azure Analysis Services, Azure Data Factory, Azure SQL Database, Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft SQL Server, Azure Active Directory, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Business Central.