An expanding business and plans for more store openings globally meant Graff needed powerful data analytical tools to both give its executives fast, effective business intelligence insights, aiding data-driven decisions, as well as sharing with the store leaders a consistent view on store performance. Graff therefore deployed Microsoft Power BI to help take its data visualisation to the next level and provide advanced reporting capabilities and collaboration.

Graff depends on technology across production, marketing, operations and distribution, empowering its employees and scaling for growth.

Having already deployed Power BI, enhancing the useability and data modelling aspects of the analytics software was a top priority for the IT team. It turned to its technology advisory partner Codestone for advice and recommendations on data modelling and performance enhancements, as well as methodology validation. The IT team wanted to understand more about the use of data dimensions and how data could be presented with consistent formatting standards for reports using data content and hierarchical arrangements.

Segun Orija, SQL Data Analyst at Graff explains, “The business wanted to develop and roll out better reports on our overall sales transactions, allowing our management and store teams to work on consistent data and work towards common objectives. Our business development team needed to be able to visualise consistent sales data across the business and set targets. The executives needed reports based on sales performance data and, at a store level, managers needed quick figures based on daily, weekly and monthly sales.”

To support Graff’s Power BI journey, Codestone ran a workshop for Segun and his colleague to look at more efficient ways of getting what they needed out of Power BI and to help realise the full benefits of the analytics software.

Segun continues, “Codestone was really helpful and gave me advice and useful recommendations on improving on the scope and user-friendliness of our Power BI reports. For example, our weekly sales reports now use a mixture of tables, graphs and line charts, enabling users to drill and visualise through navigation, easily switching via toggle buttons between period and cumulative; and in product sales reports users can switch between classification and sub-class.”

Graff is in the process of rolling out sales consultant reports with target data for use in all stores across Europe, Asia and USA. Each store manager will be able to manage and visualise their data, both in local and core currency, on their laptop or iPads, via the data models and apps that Segun has created. Codestone also showed Graff how to create security permissions to ensure that store managers are only able to see the data that is relevant to them.

“The visualisation capability of Power BI and the way we’re setting up the reports means it’s easy for users to click through data, filter and see what they need to from a single dashboard. It’s also very user-friendly so it is becoming a popular data analytical tool across the organisation,” adds Segun.

With Microsoft Power BI, Graff now provides its executives, management and C-level decision makers with near real time reports with meaningful insight and user-friendly visualisations. As a result, Graff is transforming data into actionable insights to create data-driven sales processes that span from product creation to the consumer experience.