A multinational retailer streamlined operations and cut costs by deploying a Power BI solution that consolidates data from various sources, enhancing efficiency and accuracy.
SITUATION
Our client, a multinational retailer, needed to centralize data from multiple clouds to one comprehensive application to give stakeholders complete financial visibility. The executives involved with the cloud infrastructure needed a solution to streamline data to guide their cloud budgeting and technology spending decisions. They were looking for a technology partner that could handle everything from application development to building a reporting dashboard that would enable them to make informed decisions. This is why they turned to Apex. Additionally, Apex's partnerships with Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Oracle made us an ideal partner for this project.
Power BI Drives Automation, And Uncovers Cloud Cost Optimization
Apex used the client’s data to create a Power BI solution that helps them with their data analytic reporting. Along with data and analytics, this project called for an AI component as well. Apex used a Power Apps Data Hub model to read free text invoices to calculate totals and classify them to the respective area of the client’s company. The Power BI solution we developed included a reporting dashboard that summarized all cloud costs, costs per resource group, usage by service, and more by integrating with multiple data sources. This report was automated to update daily with a summarized report sent to leaders weekly via Power Automate. The stakeholders now had clear spending visibility to compare year over year or month over month, giving them critical insights on how to improve budgets.
RESULT
Apex met and exceeded the client’s goals by creating an application that became their single source of truth for all cloud financials. The application developed allowed the client to justify asking for larger budgets where needed and gave them enhanced visibility that ultimately led to reducing their overall cloud spend.
Additionally, we drastically reduced the client's time spent on reporting. For example, one report that used to take three hours to build is now automatic through the application. The AI model was created for extrapolating data from the on-prem spend invoices and automating the subsequent email reporting. Automating the delivery of reports via email further saved time in what could have otherwise been a manual process.
In summary, implementing a scalable Power BI solution allowed for the seamless integration of data from different sources and led to significant reductions in time and effort of client resources, along with minimizing errors and driving cost reductions. Apex was able to scale the solution from Power BI, integrating MS Fabric and ML scripting, which will continue to not only drive cost optimization, but ultimately leveraging AI/ML to predict future spend.
