Summary
As a regional supermarket chain with over 100 stores across Texas and Louisiana, Brookshire Brothers grappled with a fragmented data infrastructure that hampered their ability to gain a comprehensive view of business operations and performance.
The company sought the expertise of a data consultant who could unify their data sources, enhance analytics capabilities, and deliver a reliable source of truth for their business units. ExistBI stepped in and delivered a tailored solution that drastically streamlined Brookshire Brothers’ data management.
Read how ExistBI crafted a tailored solution, including a modern, efficient, and robust data warehouse and analytical platform that empowered the supermarket chain to leverage their data for unprecedented insights, improved efficiency, and enhanced decision-making.
About Brookshire Brothers
Brookshire Brothers is a regional supermarket chain with over 100 stores across Texas and Louisiana in the United States. The retailer offers a wide range of products, including groceries, prescription medications, over-the-counter drugs, and health and wellness products, and household essentials for urban and rural customers.
In addition to their supermarket operations, Brookshire Brothers operates fuel centers at select locations, providing gasoline and other automotive services. They also offer a loyalty program that allows customers to earn points on their purchases and redeem them for discounts or other rewards.
Challenge
Brookshire Brothers found themselves confronting a complex data management challenge. Their data infrastructure was fragmented, scattered across 24 different applications and systems. This fragmentation was hindering their ability to consolidate information, gain a comprehensive view of business operations, and enhance their data analytics capabilities.
Aware of the need to streamline their data processes to remain competitive, Brookshire Brothers sought the expertise of a data consultant. They needed a partner who could consolidate their diverse data sources, provide integrated governance and security, and deliver a single, reliable source of truth for all their analytic needs across the company and its business units.
Specifically, they were looking for a data management expert who could:
- Propose a modern Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) and analytical platform that considered how to ingest data from the various data sources, transformed and prepared data for analysis, and stored and served data as requested,
- Evaluate different target architectures at a technical and financial level,
- Deliver an architecture that would enable self-service capability at different stages including data exploration, discovery, delivery, and reporting,
- Design data management and reporting for data at the producer and consumer level,
- Standardize and automate report delivery,
- Provide input for an RFP document that Brookshire Brothers can go to market with for the implementation of the data warehouse solution.
Enter ExistBI. Selected for their expertise, ExistBI embarked on a journey to transform Brookshire Brothers’ data management.
Solution
ExistBI first began with requirements gathering sessions with key stakeholders in sales, order management, vendor management, marketing, sales, finance, inventory, warehousing, IT, HR, loyalty program management, legal, asset protection and audit. ExistBI found that each department had many questions that they wanted the data to answer including:
Sales, Orders, Customers
| Vendor, Marketing, Sales
| Finance
|
Warehouse
| HR
| Loyalty
|
With a thorough understanding of Brookshire Brothers’ needs, ExistBI proposed a comprehensive solution: a modern data warehouse and analytical platform built using Microsoft SQL Server Database, Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services, Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services, and Microsoft SQL Power BI Report Server. These tools were selected for their scalability, robust security measures, and seamless integration capabilities.
Data warehousing – Microsoft SQL Server
Microsoft SQL Server provides numerous advantages, such as its ability to scale and handle large data volumes effectively, managing and processing data warehouse workloads, accommodating growing data sizes and meeting increasing user demands.
It incorporates features like indexing, query optimization, and parallel processing, which significantly enhance query response times and overall performance in data warehousing. These capabilities contribute to the efficient retrieval and manipulation of data.
The platform also prioritizes robust security measures, including user authentication, role-based access control, and data encryption. By adhering to industry standards and regulations like HIPAA, Microsoft SQL Server ensures the protection of sensitive data and compliance with global data protection requirements.
Microsoft SQL Server also seamlessly integrates and interoperates with various Microsoft tools, such as Microsoft Excel, Power BI, and Azure services which delivers streamlined workflows and enables users to leverage a comprehensive suite of tools for data analysis, reporting, and cloud-based services.
ETL – Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
ExistBI proposed Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) as the extract, transform, load (ETL) tool as it allows users to efficiently extract data from various sources and file formats, transform them according to specific business rules, and load the data into target systems or data warehouses. It supports a wide range of data sources and formats, making it suitable for diverse integration scenarios.
SSIS also provides a visual development environment where users can design, execute, automate and schedule complex workflows and data integration processes. It is designed to handle large volumes of data efficiently, as it employs parallel processing, optimized data flow transformations, and bulk loading techniques to achieve high performance in data integration tasks. SSIS also provides built-in features for error handling, data validation, and data cleansing, ensuring data quality during the integration process.
Finally, SSIS allows users to develop custom script tasks and components to incorporate custom business logic, data transformations, or integration scenarios specific to their needs.
Analytics – Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)
Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) provides a robust platform for building multidimensional and tabular models, which enable organizations to perform advanced analytics and gain valuable insights from their data. It supports complex calculations, aggregations, hierarchies, and KPIs, allowing users to create sophisticated business intelligence solutions.
It also integrates seamlessly with various reporting and visualization tools, such as Power BI and Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services and enables users to explore and analyze data through interactive dashboards, reports, and ad-hoc queries, facilitating data-driven decision-making.
Since SSAS is designed to handle large volumes of data and support concurrent user access, it delivers fast query response times and optimal performance even with complex analytical workloads. The data mining algorithms and functionalities allow users to perform advanced analytics, uncover patterns, and make predictions based on historical data.
Reporting – Microsoft SQL Power BI Report Server
Power BI Report Server allows organizations to host and manage their Power BI reports and dashboards on-premises which is particularly beneficial for organizations that have strict data governance and security requirements or have data sources that cannot be easily moved to the cloud.
The centralized platform for creating, publishing, and managing reports allows users to design visually appealing and interactive reports and publish them to a secure server for easy access by authorized users.
Power BI Report Server supports a wide range of data sources, including SQL Server, Oracle, SharePoint, and on-premises data sources, such as SQL Server databases, allowing organizations to leverage existing data infrastructure and create reports based on real-time or near-real-time data.
Finally, users can create workspaces, share reports with specific users or groups, and collaborate on report development, fostering a data-driven culture and facilitating knowledge sharing.
Results
Impressed with ExistBI’s approach, Brookshire Brothers decided to move forward with the proposed solution. ExistBI was tasked to:
- Design the final architecture, with clear indication of all data sources, targets and applications as per the outcome of the initial requirement gathering step,
- Create mock-ups for the dashboards and reports,
- Outline the detailed plans for the upcoming implementation phase,
- Deliver training for each of the deployed tools to enable team members to administrate, maintain and use the new Enterprise Data Warehouse solution.
With a clear blueprint for their future data infrastructure, Brookshire Brothers is poised to enter a new era of data management. The modern, efficient, and robust data warehouse and analytical platform will enable them to leverage their data for unprecedented insights, improved efficiency, and enhanced decision-making.
Ready to transform your data capabilities? Book a free consultation with our experts today and start your journey toward better data management.
