Moving from Excel to Cloud Architecture for Large Brand

Challenges

• A large retail brand was operating with siloed, Excel-based reporting across a fragmented data landscape. Data arrived from many SaaS platforms and internal systems, each requiring manual processing.
• Leadership had no single version of the truth. Each team had its own numbers, its own definitions, its own spreadsheet. The business had simply outgrown Excel and needed more sophisticated technologies.

Approach

• Facilitated workshops to design data architecture to current and future needs.
• Designed and implemented cloud data architecture from scratch.
• Implemented Data Lake in medallion design.
• Built data ingestion pipelines from multiple data sources, primarily via APIs.
• Designed a shared dimensional data model for analytics consumption across the business.
• Designed shared reporting layer with visualization tool and data definitions.

Results

• Cloud data architecture to handle large data volumes and a growing business.
• Automated data ingestion — replacing manual work and reducing the risk of errors.
• Unified data model with consistent definitions and one source of truth.
• Improved insights and analytics across the business.

Technologies & methods

Cloud Architecture Data Lake Data Ingestion Data Pipelines Analytics Platform Azure Power BI