Centralised overview of SKU sales via Azure – Prik&Tik

Prik&Tik is an out-of-home retail cooperative that brings together nearly 100 beverage retailers across Belgium. Prik&Tik offers its affiliated retailers an extensive and competitive range of beverages and supports them with strong and innovative concepts. Prik&Tik aims to be the first choice for consumers by offering a complete range of products with attractive promotions.

Prik&Tik’s mission is to help its affiliated beverage retailers achieve sustainable profitable growth, provide guidance and work with them to ensure that Prik&Tik is promoted as the first choice for professional and private customers.

The briefing

The top priority for Prik&Tik is to consolidate and map the sales data from nearly 100 Prik&Tik branches to a single centralised system with a reporting layer. Because the sales data is not consolidated, Prik&Tik is unable to respond to supplier requests and does not have an optimal negotiating position with suppliers. In order to enable reporting of sales data down to product level, the sales data from the various branches needs to be mapped to a central item list with consistent SKU names.

Prik&Tik calls on Cloubis to develop a comprehensive Business Intelligence solution that provides an overview of data from various beverage retailers:

• Collecting and centralising data by providing integrations with various types of cash register systems. Initially, this concerns sales data, but other integrations can also be provided in later phases (e.g. customer data).
• Translating and mapping data from disparate sources to a shared master data source.
• Creating reports to provide insights into this data.

Our solution

To ensure a controllable and scalable environment for structural reporting, Cloubis has set up an Azure Data Platform in Azure Synapse. This data platform can process multiple data sources and formats. We use our own Azure Data Framework to enable rapid implementation using best practices.

The initial setup focuses on a (micro)batch architecture, which means that we can load data in batches within a reasonable time frame. In the future, it will be possible to add (near) real-time data sources and reports using the same services.

Prik&Tik’s data sources are imported using Azure Synapse and stored in a data lake on a storage account (Azure Data Lake Storage gen 2). On top of the data lake, we provide Power BI datasets (data models) where the sales data per SKU is reported according to article list conventions.

The result

Prior to the collaboration with Cloubis, Prik&Tik branches used different cash register systems and different SKU names, which resulted in different source data. This made it impossible to report Prik&Tik’s sales data across branches.

Cloubis provided:

• Centralised and automated data integration/data consolidation of the cash register systems
• Mapping of SKUs from the various cash register systems to the master names of the SKUs based on the item list in Navision
• Reporting layer that provides insight into SKU sales at a consolidated and detailed level

This solution enables Prik&Tik to operate based on figures rather than gut feeling. It also provides insight into the impact of promotions, among other things. With this data platform, Prik&Tik has taken the first step towards a data-driven culture. The dashboards and insights created will further incentivise this.