The challenge
A 50-location auto parts retailer had no timely data. Every week, two head-office employees pulled data from each store’s database and combined it in Excel, and by the time they finished it was more than a week old.
With no view across the business, each store bought from suppliers on its own and missed volume discounts, stock couldn’t be moved between stores to catch sales, and there were no common KPIs to compare store performance.
Our approach
We built a data warehouse on Microsoft Azure with Power BI dashboards, using automated scripts to collect and standardize data from every store. Leaders now have more than 35 live financial and operational views, from the balance sheet and P&L to inventory and sales by store, and can drill down from the whole business to a single transaction. We also trained the team to build its own reports.
The outcome
The manual reporting work, about $300K a year, is gone, and data that was a week old is now live. The retailer can move stock between stores to capture sales, coordinate purchasing to earn volume discounts and compare stores on the same KPIs.
live financial and operational reports
data for leaders, where it used to be 7+ days old
For 10 years, I thought I knew my business. The insights I've gotten from our data project in just a short time have uncovered operations and cost efficiencies that I had no visibility into before.
CFO, auto parts retailer
