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Retail Data Success: HSO Solves Performance Issues with a Data Platform Modernization Using HSO's DnA Accelerator and Azure Data Lake
By taking a more holistic data solution rather than one focusing on inventory management, HSO transformed this retailer's data structure, reducing storage costs, optimizing for big data, and providing real-time availability
About
This national tire retailer has more than 1,900 company-owned and franchise stores across the US.
Challenge
This retailer had approached HSO for an inventory management solution. Before implementing that, they needed a data platform modernization with a common repository and big data processing and consumption in near-real time to support the volume, variety, and transaction quantity.
After HSO implemented Dynamics 365 Finance, this retailer engaged HSO again help them reconcile records between the POS and the inventory system. When a sale occurs, the company has less than ten minutes to pick the tires from inventory and deliver them to stores on van runs.
Because of the high volume and variety of inventory from different suppliers the company carries, the system was unable to provide an accurate inventory count.
Solution
The company had previously run their inventory management using on premises servers and were used to having access to all their data in near-instantaneous time. Now they were struggling with the cloud deployment of Dynamics 365.
After evaluation, HSO decided to take a more holistic approach to the data solution rather than one focusing on inventory management. By taking a data-first approach, HSO made the following recommendations:
- Use Azure Data Lake to provide a common repository
- Provide big data processing using Azure Synapse for near-real time data processing and consumption by downstream apps/reports
- Include the ability to add new tables and D365 entities without major code changes
- Utilize HSO’s DnA Accelerator to accelerate the enablement of the Azure Data Platform with Azure Data Lake, Azure Synapse, and data pipelines
Once the data platform project was completed, HSO kicked off the inventory project with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.
While all inventory, including products used for service, needed to be centralized, the company decided to start with tires. They carry multiple SKUs from 12 manufacturers, so tires are the biggest and most important lift. This scalable solution has become the cornerstone of the company’s ERP landscape by centralizing a large, complex inventory in one system running on Azure.
The retailer recently acquired 500 stores and is bringing on 800-1,000 more. While this could be accomplished (with manual migrations) in an on-premises environment, it would not be sustainable. With Dynamics 365 and the new data platform in place, onboarding to the system will no longer cause performance loss.
Results
This approach brings data into a data lake for processing from different data sources (e.g., D365) for big data consumption in near real-time. Data is made available in Delta format for curated zones, which provides: 1) highly compressed data, which reduces storage costs; 2) optimized big data processing for high-performance queries to execute; and 3) near-real time availability.