Consolidating POS Data for Spin Master with Microsoft Power Apps

Background and Challenge Story

Spin Master products are sold in many different retailers across the globe. To gain insights from the point of sale (POS) data provided by each retailer, Spin Master needed an efficient way to manage large volumes of data and transform them to align with internal product codes.

Spin Master saw an opportunity to use Microsoft Azure cloud analytic services to consolidate their POS data and automate the process of conforming data to provide reliable and efficient reporting.

Why Zelusit?

As Canada’s leading Microsoft analytics partner, Zelusit was an obvious candidate for Spin Master to evaluate. Through their evaluation process, Spin Master learned of Zelusit’s deep knowledge and experience enabling cloud-based analytics for clients across many industries.

Zelusit is proud to have been recognized as the winner of Microsoft’s 2022 Data Platform Modernization, Financial Services, and Modern Marketing Impact Awards. These awards are evidence of Zelusit’s ability to deliver value-driven data solutions to complex business challenges across sectors.

Zelusit’s Solution: POS Data Analytics

Spin Master’s approach was guided by Zelusit’s prior experience. Following a collaborative discovery and analysis phase, Zelusit’s Azure architect worked with Spin Master’s team to design and implement Azure analytic services to match the organization’s security and operational requirements. Once this foundation was in place, the teams from Zelusit and Spin Master focused on a single POS data source as the basis for designing a flexible pipeline for proving the integration, transformation, and data model design.

Zelusit’s team was also engaged to develop initial reports to analyze the POS data with Power BI. As the project’s focus was to make Spin Master’s team self-sufficient and minimize the overhead of onboarding additional POS data sources, Zelusit successfully supported Spin Master developers to take ownership of Power BI development.

Onboarding for additional POS data is now being led by Spin Master with minimal effort and support from Zelusit.

Microsoft Azure

Zelusit worked with Spin Master’s integration developers to define a common data format for bringing data into Microsoft Azure. The Azure Foundation designed and implemented by Zelusit was structured with security and data governance to deliver suitable access controls.

Azure Data Factory

Zelusit created data pipelines with Azure Data Factory to extract, transform, load (ETL) POS data in a curated data model. The pipelines were designed to be flexible and adaptable, so Spin Master can configure the transformation to support data sources from different retailers’ POS systems.

Power Apps

Conforming varied product identification fields from each of the retailers was achieved using an intuitive application built in Microsoft Power Apps. The Power App program created by Zelusit’s developers provides a user-friendly interface for matching the product codes from incoming POS data to Spin Master’s naming conventions.

Power BI

To help Spin Master improve their sales reporting, Power BI was used to create dashboards and pull reporting on sales to better organize data for decision-making. Following limited knowledge transfer, Spin Master’s own employees are now able to design reports independently.

Impact

• Reducing manual errors in data
• Standardization of data
• Ability to independently onboard POS systems
• Informed business decision-making

The project was a success and was delivered under budget and on time. Zelusit’s solution eliminated manual efforts for the client – resulting in more efficient and accurate mapping of product codes and standardized data.

Our focus on knowledge transfer and collaboration has also given Spin Master the tools to independently onboard POS data from other retailers in a cost and time-efficient manner.

Implementing Power BI dashboards produced a detailed view of reporting, leading to better and quicker business decision-making for Spin Master.

Interested in learning more about Microsoft Azure, Power Apps, Data Factory or Power BI? Speak to one of our consultants today.