Case Study 1
Friday, October 1st, 2021
Background
Sunrise Group Inc. is a retail giant that has been dominating the market for more than 40 years. It has around 150 stores in 6 states. The organization is known for being innovative, it has collected a massive amount of information but it is failing to utilize it fully. Sunrise Group Inc. has a variety of technologies to collect and manage the information which includes a data warehouse, an in-house business intelligence (BI) system and other reporting tools. Their daily sales are recorded manually in Microsoft excel. A sample of daily sales data is shown below.
Each branch is managed by a Branch Manager. The details of each Branch Manager are stored in a separate table that will be linked to the sales data by branch code. The database also includes a date reference table. A sample of this table is shown below:
In addition, they have an SQL Server Analysis Service cube that has millions of rows and SQL Server 2016 for the accounting system. So they rely heavily on the IT department to extract insights from the data they generate. Sales reports are sent from the branches to the head office by close of business every day.
Challenges
The sales figures sometimes reach the head office late and it becomes difficult to track the daily sales figures. The reports do not have the standard template, which makes consolidation very difficult and full of errors. The SQL Server database is not being utilized fully to produce real-time reports.
Requirements
With these challenges, the Sunrise Group Inc. have settled for Power BI as their choice and they have these requirements among others:
- The c-suite requires a visual that shows sales by region.
- Branch Managers want to drill down through monthly to daily figures.
- Branch managers should be able to view near real-time data.
- The Branch Managers must only see sales of their respective branches only.
- The Sales Managers require a visual to compare current year and previous year sales by date.
- The users want the flexibility of creating visuals to answer questions that do not have visuals on a report or dashboard.