Microsoft Fabric reduces 50% cloud expenses and makes near-real-time reporting possible

About client  

Our client is a leading tire distributor from the United States. Their customers are tire dealers and retail shop owners across the country. Working with leading automotive brands and retailers, they strive to ensure seamless inventory management and supply chain operations, while ensuring customer satisfaction.  

Challenges  

Managing a decade-long business acting as a middleman between tire manufacturers and retailers, they had to ace the following operations - sales, purchases, inventory, customer handling, rebates, and forecasting future demand. To handle it like a pro, they required an aggregated view of data.   

A scattered data landscape: Their current data architecture looks fine enough for now. Snowflake for data warehouse storage. Power BI for reporting and dashboard needs. And, ADF for data pipelines. This set up is able to provision business reports they need within a reasonable time. But, using multiple data tools from different providers was a bit difficult to manage, and if they had to scale or migrate to another platform, it could be a nightmare.   

High data volumes: Their data volume was high, and processing requirements were higher. They needed an easy and simple repository where they could access centralized data and create business and critical reports, whenever they needed.  

No near-real-time capabilities: They had pretty-good functioning data pipelines and warehouses to view the aggregated data as reports and dashboards. However, the batch and incremental workloads didn’t support real-time or near-real-time data availability.     

Our solution 

The team already had Snowflake and Power BI. They wanted something advanced, which would reduce their reliance on multiple platform vendors and billing. They also wanted to ensure scalability and real-time data movement.  

Hence, we suggested Microsoft Fabric - a unified SaaS-based data platform that combines pipelines, data engineering, visualization, and more. Their team already familiar with the Microsoft environment, is an added advantage.  Here’s the overview of the new architecture we have implemented.  

• Implemented Medallian architecture with a meta-data driven approach. Here, the data from sources reaches the destination through three layers, bronze, silver, and gold, making its quality and usability better as it passes each layer.   

• Enabled dynamic schema support to seamless table addition, schema updates, version handling, and meta-data tagging without affecting the downstream process.   

Impact? 

Everything is under one window now, which is Microsoft Fabric. The team is able to receive business reports in near-real-time. This led to the following changes.  

• One billing. Reduced cloud expenses. No longer have to pay for multiple data tools.   

• Right now, their Power BI premium license covers their Microsoft Fabric costing, meaning the entire data architecture, which means we have saved 50 to 60% of data tool & storage expenses.  

• Can get reports much faster, within 15 to 30 minutes from the time data enters the stream, without breaking a sweat. No more manual or batch processing.  

• Easy to create and view dashboards and reports using Power BI on sales, warehousing, and inventory management.    

Conclusion  

The client now showcases the near-real-time tracking reports of their products in their showroom displays, which helps everyone be aware of the end-to-end inventory and supply chain of all orders. Not only have they become data-driven, but they also have achieved it in an extremely cost-effective fashion. Microsoft Fabric has simplified their data processing, storage, and visualization, and is also suitable for their future scalability.