About The Client
Our client, an American chain of fast-casual dining restaurants with 2600 restaurants, has presence across the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and France.
They are one of the first established chains of fast-casual dining restaurants, with a team of 3000 internal managers who rely on about 400 business intelligence reports to make critical decisions. Managing store performance, operations, finances, sales, rewards, standings, food safety, recruitments, stability (retention), and customer feedback were all key criteria for the success of each location and the company overall.
Challenge
In order for the client to make informed strategic business decisions, their intelligence reports demanded accuracy. Their existing business intelligence software, Tableau had limitations and a high price tag that needed to be addressed.
The client was looking to undertake a reporting migration from Tableau to Power BI in line with a larger effort to move key infrastructure to the cloud. This held the potential for operational risk since the implementation was expected to retain and enhance the legacy business intelligence results. Moreover, the migration was time-sensitive in order to provide financial savings.
Approach
iLink planned to leverage Azure Cloud services to modernize and migrate to Power BI. This would not only provide a better integration of the client’s digital data but also the best user experience and performance. 15 resources were assigned to work on Migrating Tableau to PBI, Tableau Portal to BI Portal, and VizAlerts to UIPath (RPA) Subscriptions. The training was planned for BI Portal to all End Users in phases.
Solution
iLink seamlessly supported the client in their migration from their existing Tableau reporting system to Power BI and architected a solution to ensure the full capabilities of Power BI were leveraged. At the same time, our experts designed a semantic layer that enables a standard corporate view of the aggregated data which helps managers make more robust decisions and increase business scalability.
This agile methodology came into action in June 2020 and was followed for a duration of 10 months by the onshore/offshore team model. iLink worked side-by-side as one cohesive unit until the goal was achieved.
Outcome
Migrating to Microsoft’s Power BI resulted in improved speed to generate reports i.e less than 30 seconds, a significant reduction in time compared to tableau reports. The new robust platform created more sophisticated business intelligence analysis for the client, increased cloud capability, and cloud data computing benefits in regard to fast expansion, computing speed, security, and reliability.
Additionally, the client reaped cost-saving benefits. The invoice orders reconciliation showed an improvement of 20% indicating that the content delivery was more accurate by 20%, reducing the cost of returns and reducing inventory delays. This had a direct improvement to the Supply Chain effort.
