Today we will see, how Meijer, a retail giant, overcame modern challenges like economic fluctuation, online competitors, and changing consumer lifestyles, with the help of Power BI.
Meijer has 300 employees in each store, and they want to get the information about the data in a fraction of second! This is a task, as from purchase to front end, inventory management is a tedious task. Meijer was using variety of technologies to manage information, including a data warehouse based on Teradata, a homegrown business intelligence (BI) tool, and reporting software from other vendors.
In addition, the company’s business users relied heavily on Microsoft Excel. However, despite the diversity of technology, the company’s stakeholders all had one thing in common—they relied on IT to help extract insight from data. And managing data from premises is much more easier than from third party. Thus, Marilyn Richards, Director of Business Intelligence and Collaboration at Meijer, wanted to create a more self-sufficient environment. Building reports as when required was more of being self sufficient than waiting for IT to submit reports periodically.
Realizing that most employees were familiar with Excel, the company decided to use the spreadsheet software as a starting point for transforming BI. And when Richards and her team learned about Microsoft Power BI and its self-service capabilities, they knew they had found the right solution. With SQL server, Power Bi, would provide great insights in the data with real-time service deliveries, is what they strongly felt. And today, it provides insights on sales across regions, stores, and individual departments—in less than two seconds!
This has drastically boosted their profitability, and the next on the radar is having Office 365 and Power Bi, Machine learning in each store, to gain the competitive advantage.