What are the Benefits of Microsoft Fabric for Retailers?
Data for retailers can be almost as important to them as their products, and the reasons can be found in the famous Rudyard Kipling quote:
“I keep six honest serving men (they taught me all I knew); their names are What, Why, When, How, Where and Who.” With the release of Microsoft Fabric, Kipling’s famous six are easier than ever for retailers to leverage for business success. Microsoft Fabric empowers retailers to harness these “six honest serving men” more effectively than ever, driving smarter business decisions and better outcomes.
Just as I sometimes struggle to find my favourite products at major supermarkets or online stores, retailers often face similar issues with accessing data. Microsoft Fabric is designed to help overcome these obstacles, making it easier to find and use the data that drives your business.
In this blog I will explore the 6 questions retailers should be asking themselves to maximise the benefits of Fabric.
What are we selling?
This, on the face of it, is a simple question, but in retail, data is not always structured the way we want. Often, there are constraints on legacy platforms as the IT department focuses more on front-end development than back-end development and product catalogues can be held in a number of silos depending on the sales channel.
Using Fabric shortcuts, these data silos and varying platforms are combined to deliver a unified data source for developers and analysts. Fabric shortcuts enable linking to data in platforms such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Azure Storage and can even be used to link to on-premise data stores. This enables data analysis across multiple platforms to build that consolidated product catalogue vital to a performant retail business.
Why have sales or customer behaviours changed?
Tradition has it that a data platform covers data ingestion, modelling, and reporting. We all know that those business performance reports raise questions about what drives sales or customer behaviour changes, resulting in more work for data teams to analyse further. This process is repeated over and over again.
Help is at hand to break this cycle – AI, machine learning, and Copilot are built into Microsoft Fabric, enabling retailers to develop richer data models and analysis to answer those tricky ‘Why’ questions.
When this happens, then do what?
Retailers who use Microsoft Fabric have a platform which can provide a data lens on the ‘When’. When data changes, or a message is created from an IoT device, an ‘event’ is created. These events are data points that can drive actions depending on the values and can be acted upon using Microsoft Fabric Data Activator.
Can your data platform tell you when you are running low on stock as it happens or when a team has just passed its sales target? Microsoft Fabric Data Activator can change a data platform from reactive to proactive, enabling retailers to adjust to current trading patterns rather than relying on historical patterns or assumptions.
How?
I’m going to save this until the end.
Where are my customers?
Retailers already know a lot about their customers and this information can be enhanced further with a little data engineering magic in Microsoft Fabric. Do you know if the weather conditions caused a spike in sales for one location but not another or if a bank holiday or festival has had an impact? This information is now easy to add to your data platform for richer analytics with Microsoft Fabric Data Activator.
How is my product being transported to the customer? Power BI visuals can help here by displaying data overlaid on a map, which helps to understand geographic locations and traffic.
Who are my customers – Can I personalise their purchases using data?
Personalising the customer experience is nothing new, as we know that customers who purchase product X also buy product Y. But how do we leverage any analysis to drive personalisation from an analytics platform to an e-commerce platform?
When using Microsoft D365, data in Microsoft Fabric can be linked directly into D365 to drive personalisation. If you are not a D365 customer, data can be accessed using the Microsoft Fabric Onelake APIs.
And finally – How
This is the easy part: Reach out to our Hitachi Solutions Data experts and have them support you in getting your data ready and maximising the benefits from Microsoft Fabric.
