Fortude supports leading Australian furniture retailer in its journey to data maturity

A prominent Australian furniture retailer with a strong nationwide presence, faced growing challenges in managing and scaling its data infrastructure. Disconnected reporting systems, inconsistent data sources, and limited governance across tools like Excel created roadblocks for timely and accurate business insights. 

Challenges 

• Lack of a unified data source: Core data such as cash and sales were reconciled manually due to the absence of a single master data repository. 

• Decentralised Power BI usage: While Power BI was used for self-service analytics, it lacked governance, process controls, and content management. 

• Inconsistent reporting methods: Business reports were delivered via Excel and PDF through email, with varying development methods across SSRS, Excel, and SSAS-based reports. 

• Data silos and Excel dependency: Heavy reliance on Excel for downstream reporting and emerging siloed cloud data lakes added to the complexity. 

• Limited scalability and performance: The existing BI infrastructure had a single daily ETL refresh, creating a bottleneck and limiting real-time analytics capabilities. 

• No enterprise data strategy: There was no long-term roadmap for enterprise-wide data and analytics, limiting alignment and growth. 

Solution 

Fortude partnered with the company to lay the foundation for a future-ready, enterprise-scale data ecosystem by delivering: 

• A modern analytics platform: Designed and implemented a unified data architecture comprising a lakehouse-based data platform and an enterprise data warehouse on Microsoft Fabric. 

• Standardised reporting: Developed a BI semantic model for sales to enable self-service analytics and delivered standard paginated reports for mass consumption. 

• Cloud alignment: Enabled data replication from various on-premise sources (MySQL, SQL Server, DB2) to OneLake for downstream processing and to reduce overhead on source systems. 

• Strategic data roadmap: Provided architectural documentation and long-term recommendations to reduce redundancies. 

• Master data consolidation: Defined Infor M3 ERP as the master system for key business data such as items, customers, suppliers, and warehousing. 

Impact 

• Unified data reporting: Delivered consistent, governed reporting with near-real-time capabilities, improving business agility. 

• Empowered users: Enabled secure and structured self-service analytics, reducing reliance on IT for insights. 

• Eliminated silos: Consolidated reporting across multiple systems, reducing redundancy and ensuring a single source of truth. 

• Supports scalability: Established a scalable data infrastructure on Azure, positioning the business for future cloud-native growth. 

• Improved resilience: Reduced single points of failure through better architecture and introduced disaster recovery planning. 

Technologies Used: Azure Data Factory, Fabric, Power BI, OneLake 

What’s next? 

• Expand solution to cover analytics requirements of other business functions like finance and supply chain. 

• Support integration of upcoming system upliftment and installation into solution. 

• Driving intelligent automation with advanced AI technologies. 

Fortude was recognised as the winner of the Digital Transformation Award for APAC by AICPA & CIMA, 2024, and the Data Solution implemented for this company was a key case study included in the entry.