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From Lag to Leadership: How a Leading Multi-brand Fashion Retailer Transformed Data into Instant Insight Using Microsoft Fabric

Company Overview

With a portfolio of 27+ globally renowned fashion brands and a retail footprint spread across 1,300+ stores in 180 cities, this enterprise stands as a titan in the Indian retail landscape. Their product catalogue boasts over 200,000 SKUs, cutting across categories from casualwear to luxury apparel.

The operational scale was immense with dynamic pricing, inventory planning, marketing campaigns, and merchandising decisions occurring daily across hundreds of zones. To remain competitive in a volatile retail market, they needed a modern data foundation that could deliver speed, consistency, and clarity across the board.


The Fractured Foundation: Challenges

The company’s earlier data setup was based on Google BigQuery, with Python-based cloud functions handling extraction from Oracle, Snowflake, and other systems. However, it suffered from multiple critical challenges:

  • Stale insights: Reporting delays of 24–72 hours were common, impacting responsiveness.

  • Data silos: Sales, merchandising, warehouse, and marketing teams relied on disconnected systems and reports.

  • Scalability issues: The data pipelines could not handle frequent product refreshes or real-time updates during high-velocity campaigns.

  • Manual overload: Business users spent 15–20 hours/week validating numbers and reconciling inconsistencies between reports.

The real issue wasn't just about tools; it was about trust. Functional teams lacked confidence in their data, resulting in slow decisions, missed opportunities, and duplicated efforts.


Goals Behind the Journey: Business Objectives

  • Modernize Analytics: Migrate from fragmented legacy systems to a unified, scalable data platform

  • Enable Real-Time Decisions: Provide instant access to insights for faster, data-driven actions

  • Empower Business Users: Promote self-service analytics for 200+ stakeholders across departments

  • Optimize Inventory & Margins: Improve inventory turns and margin visibility with timely insights

  • Eliminate Manual Effort: Automate reporting and reduce reconciliation time

  • Scale with Confidence: Build a future-ready architecture aligned with Microsoft Fabric strategy


Why They Chose atQor

The company selected atQor based on three strategic differentiators:

  1. Expertise in Microsoft Fabric & Azure ecosystem
    atQor’s proven delivery frameworks for modern data platforms, coupled with co-sell alignment with Microsoft, made them an ideal transformation partner.

  2. Retail industry familiarity
    With experience across fashion and FMCG use cases, atQor understood the nuances of sell-through, markdowns, and stock rotation challenges.

  3. Accelerated go-live commitment
    atQor’s pre-built accelerators and agile methodology enabled a 90-day full rollout across brands and departments.

The goal wasn’t just to fix the plumbing; it was to reimagine how business users engage with data.


Stitching a Smart Data Fabric: Solutions

The solution was built on Microsoft Fabric, leveraging a medallion architecture to separate raw, refined, and curated data. Key solution components included:

  • OneLake-based Data Lakehouse: Bronze-Silver-Gold layers ensured clean, governed data at every stage

  • Real-time ingestion pipelines: Integrated data from Oracle, Snowflake, and FTP feeds using Data Pipelines and Dataflow Gen2

  • Power BI Embedded dashboards: Delivered tailored insights to category managers, inventory teams, and executives

  • Secure collaboration with Azure AD B2B + RBAC: Ensured the right users had access to the right data, internally and externally

  • Automated workflows: Logic Apps and Azure Monitor powered automated data refreshes, notifications, and SLA monitoring

The entire architecture was built to support modular scale, enabling future growth, brand expansion, and analytics maturity.


Impact Beyond the Dashboard: Business Benefits

Within just 12 weeks, the transformation was live and driving measurable change.

Business benefits included:

  • 90% reduction in report latency – from 2–3 days to near real-time

  • $450,000+ in annual savings from reduced manual processing

  • 18% improvement in inventory turns, reducing overstock and missed sales

  • 220+ business users onboarded to self-service analytics

  • 9 departments and 4 key brands transformed in under 90 days

Human Impact:

  • Category managers can now view sales, returns, and product velocity instantly, optimizing stock during peak campaigns and flash sales

  • Finance teams now track product margins with confidence, using curated dashboards without data wrangling

  • Analysts reduced time spent on manual reports by 75%, enabling them to focus on strategy, simulations, and forecasting

This was not just IT optimization — this was business empowerment through data trust and transparency.


Quote from the Frontlines

“This transformation unlocked more than just real-time reporting, it changed how our business operates. Teams across merchandising, finance, and planning are now empowered with insights at their fingertips. We’ve eliminated manual effort, accelerated decisions, and created a single version of truth. It’s no longer about chasing reports, it’s about driving results.” — Head of IT, Leading Multi-brand Fashion Retailer