A corporate BI system built from scratch
Reliable data every morning and a single version of the figures for the whole company.
- Context
- The company analysed sales with an old tool (QlikView) and spreadsheets. Information arrived late and every department had its own figure.
- Challenge
- To create a reliable reporting system for management and the whole sales network, with no dedicated data team: one person to do it all.
- Solution
- Star-schema data model connected to the ERP through SQL views and external sources.
- KPIs defined with management: net sales, gross margin, profitability by product and customer, year-on-year and against budget.
- Advanced DAX measures to detect new customers, lost sales and deviations by product family, market and channel.
- Automatic daily refresh and role-based security (management, area managers, sales reps).
- Second phase: full redesign of the architecture after the change of ERP, with automated file-based loads, frozen history and a new purchasing module.
- Impact
- Reliable data available every morning; a single version of the figures for the whole company; sales budget tracking runs on the same system; the sales network checks its own data without depending on anyone.
- Tools