The client had a fragmented reporting solution, individually created for each business, in the best case, a country level. A variety of different systems and lack of internal team technical skills resulted in unmaintainable, not scalable and not robust solutions. In addition to the problems above, the client also utilised reporting tools for the ETL process, which were very cost ineffective and much slower than industry standard alternatives.

Due to increased demand, the client approached us to discuss enhancements in one of his reports as the internal team couldn't do it within the time frame required by the Board.

After a detailed analysis, we proposed to rebuild the entire UK region, which the client accepted. We explained what benefits the data warehouse will bring them.

We've also been asked to do the EMEA region as the next step of the enterprise data warehouse and group reporting solution.

The results

Our client hosts all their infrastructure and applications within Azure, and it was a natural choice to utilise Microsofts' Azure Cloud services to build desired reporting solution.

The client has structured and semi-structured data that should be extracted and transformed into the business domain. We used Azure Synapse as a set of tools for this task, allowing us to scale on demand and process data from different sources.

We also used Azure Logic Apps as a 3rd party WebHooks handler to handle changes automatically instead of pulling on demand whenever possible.

As a final result, we prepared multiple ready-build reports and data marts for self-service. We provided training so all company users can build their own custom reports if required.

Data is secured by row-level security so all users within the company can see only relevant data.