Summary
Be For Beauty is a cosmetics provider that delivers personalized skincare regimes through its online Shopify stores and prominent retailers and distributors.
Read how the company worked with ExistBI to extract sales data from various internal systems and Excel spreadsheets and develop reports that provided insights into Be For Beauty’s profitability, inventory, sales pipeline, sales volumes, channel performance, product demand and customer buying patterns.
About Be For Beauty
Be For Beauty (now called INKEY List) is a UK-based cosmetics company that builds personalized beauty and skincare regimes. INKEY List skincare products are available across the globe including the United States, Europe, Australia and Canada through their Shopify sites, as well as through large retailers and distributors like Sephora, Amazon, Selfridges and Distinct Brands.
The company was born from a belief that better (skin) knowledge powers better decisions.
Challenge
Sales data for Be For Beauty used to be stored in two different ERPs (DEAR and Shopify) and many Excel files. This made analyzing sales data cumbersome, difficult and unreliable. The company decided it was time to work with an expert who could help them consolidate data from the various systems as well as implement an analytics solution that would enable them to dig into sales trends and help forecast demand.
Be For Beaurty selected ExistBI to plan and implement a new enterprise data warehouse (EDW) because of the company’s proven experience in data migration, data warehousing, analytics, and reporting.
Solution
ExistBI worked with Be for Beauty to learn more about their sales data, the technical issues that they had previously encountered when consolidating data into a single location and the analytics that they needed to gain better insights into their business operations and performance.
After consultation with various teams, ExistBI created a design that included Microsoft Azure SQL Database, Azure Data Factory and Microsoft Power BI.
Database server – Microsoft Azure SQL Database
Microsoft Azure SQL Database is a cloud-based, fully managed relational database service that is built on the same engine as the latest version of Microsoft SQL Server, which means it inherits the same core capabilities and features. It is designed to host and manage SQL server databases in the cloud, allowing companies to offload the responsibilities of infrastructure management, maintenance, and backups to Microsoft, so they can focus on their core business.
Microsoft Azure handles all the infrastructure and management tasks, such as provisioning, patching, and backups which makes it easier to deploy and manage databases without the need for extensive database administration expertise. High availability service level agreements (SLAs) ensure that downtime is minimized in the event of hardware or software failures.
As companies grow, a company’s Azure SQL Database instance can be scaled up (or down) based on their needs and thereby controlling costs effectively. Finally, the solution offers automated backups and various security features, including data encryption at rest and in transit, built-in threat detection, Azure Active Directory integration for identity management, and role-based access control (RBAC) for granular access control.
ETL and data integration service – Microsoft Azure Data Factory
Microsoft Azure Data Factory (ADF) is a cloud-based data integration service that allows companies to create, schedule, and orchestrate data workflows, moving and transforming data from various sources to different destinations. It is a crucial tool for modern data engineering and plays a central role in data integration and data-driven workflows.
ADF allows data-driven workflows, commonly referred to as pipelines, that orchestrate the movement and transformation of data between different sources and destinations. These pipelines can be used to automate data workflows, ensuring data consistency and reliability. It supports a wide range of data sources and data types, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, and provides connectors for many popular data services, making it easy to ingest and process data from various systems.
Within Azure Data Factory, you can apply data transformation activities to modify and enrich the data as it moves through the pipeline. These transformations can include data cleaning, data filtering, data aggregation, data format conversion, and more.
Companies can create schedules for pipelines, enabling them to automate data integration workflows at specified intervals or trigger them based on events or external triggers, which can be useful for companies with global operations.
Finally, like many other Microsoft solutions, ADF supports various security and governance features, including data encryption, user authentication and access control, and compliance with industry regulations.
Reporting and analytics – Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft Power BI is a powerful and widely used business analytics service that enables users to visualize and analyze data, create interactive reports and dashboards, and share insights across an organization. It is designed to be user-friendly, allowing both technical and non-technical users to gain valuable insights from their data without requiring extensive data analysis or programming skills.
The solution has the capability to connect to a wide variety of on-premises and cloud-based data sources, including databases, cloud services, Excel spreadsheets, SharePoint lists, web services, and many others, making it easy to bring data together from multiple locations. It allows users to transform and shape data as per their requirements, build data models that establish relationships between different data tables and the ability to perform complex calculations that go beyond the capabilities of traditional Excel functions.
Microsoft Power BI has gained widespread popularity due to its ease of use, versatility, and integration with other Microsoft products and services.
Results
ExistBI was able to provide Be For Beauty a data management system that would enable the company to (1) transfer data from its two ERP systems and various Excel spreadsheets into a single EDW, (2) develop and test integrated data models, (3) apply governance and security rules, (4) perform analytics and (5) develop and deliver sales reports.
With the help of the new data warehouse, the leadership, product and sales teams now have an accurate view on the following:
- Product profitability of each product in inventory
- Inventory analysis by location
- Customer score and customer retention
- Sales volume by country and regions
- Sales pipeline from opportunity to orders
- Invoices by customer, product, and salesperson
- B2B sales by partner to end customers.
Do you need the expertise from a proven and experienced consultant who can implement a sophisticated data warehouse with data analytics? Let ExistBI be your data management partner to enhance the insights that you get from your data.
