Business Intelligence Platform for Retail Company

Leading Dubai based Retail Company having expertise in Retail Sales and Distribution. Customer has Retail stores in major locations of Dubai handling Products in all price verticals and Segments. Citrus Consulting Services setting up the BI Platform solution that is capable to capture, process, analyze and visualize datasets in very efficient manner, high quality standards, secured, and intuitive for end users.

Citrus Consulting Services Empowers Leading Retail Company in Dubai with Business Intelligence Platform to Manage Different Departments.

Our Client is looking for a Visualization solution to manage its different departments. The objective of the scope is to integrate Power BI with the SAP system for source to be used in Power BI.

The Live Operational Dashboards in Power BI has to be directly integrated with SAP to monitor the Shop Floor for Job Controllers and Vehicles Status on the Shop Floor and SAP BW Queries development / Changes and ETL necessary for meeting the Dashboard and reporting requirements. The Operational Dashboards includes Store Floor Analysis, Warehouse, CRM and HR.

Client has array of SAP applications and store all of its data into SAP HANA Database. Currently using Bobj, data has been extracted for BI system. solution should provide rich and robust BI system, to enhance existing KPI’s and create new KPI’s and metrics based on SAP HANA datasets either direct or by an aggregation approach.

Proposed solution with Power BI, Direct query and streaming datasets will be integrated into Power BI for Operations and live reports. By using inbuilt DAX libraries of functions and operators, dynamic aggregations and custom metrics will be created based on KPI’s. Part of required datasets will be pushed into staging database for intense aggregation and custom metrics, custom aggregated datasets will be imported or directly queried by power BI for required KPI’s and Reports.

With Azure Data Factor, the pipelines will be created to load SAP HANA data into staging SQL Server and perform certain aggregation operations based on KPI and reports. With PowerBI Desktop, Developer can connect SAP HANA database/SQL Server/Streaming dataset to create requested KPI’s and reports. Created reports will be pushed to Power BI service workspace to share it among authenticated users.

With Data gateway, connection will be established between published Reports and Database (Azure SQL server) to load latest data and refresh datasets based on scheduled timelines.

Power BI integration kicks off with Understanding the business requirements and identify SAP HANA data source and Defining type of connection (Direct or Import) based on the user requirements and performance (based on data quantity and quality). Using identified data source, data pipelines has to be setup in Azure Data Factory with near real time data fetch and data refresh methodologies. Designing solution architecture based on above understanding and propose alternative options on data pipelines and gateway in case of performance issues or restrictions related to data access

Development Phase ends after establishing reports and dashboard creation based on requirements and published into power bi service with security and grant controls based on organization hierarchy.

The series of unit, UAT testing has to be conducted. Once all the requirement placed and with right permission, reports should be pushed into Production and all the phases ends with Project signoff.

• Setting up the High availability of Data pipelines.
• Setting up the Azure Cloud Environment and Databases.
• Robust and highly available Operational Dashboards and Reports.
• Complete and successful Alpha, Beta and User Acceptance Testing of the entire infrastructure on Azure.
• Eliminating the manual Tracking of Operational Dashboard and Reports.
• Power BI set up and Access Management.
• Successful implementation and testing of failover and failback in the Disaster Recovery scenario and Data Management.