Wellness Forever cuts time to data availability from days to minutes leveraging Azure services

Need for an integrated view of enterprise data

One of the biggest challenges Wellness Forever was facing, especially with  the onset of the pandemic, was that its data resided in siloes across multiple systems without an integrated view. Bringing relevant intelligence to stakeholders involved multiple handoffs and manual interventions. As a result, it took longer to channelize data into insights, and this affected operations, merchandise and marketing.

The organization chose to deploy Microsoft cloud services to streamline the data integration process. The ease of use, costing, transparency and security made Microsoft Azure a clear choice.

The implementation of Azure Data Lake began in March 2020 and was completed in three months. After stabilization and optimization, adoption was started in November 2021. The company also implemented Azure Databricks and Power BI.

Rapid auditing and pulse on the inventory

With Microsoft services on board, there was a significant change in the data operations of Wellness Forever. Previously, when an auditor needed data, the technical teams would fetch it from different systems, merge it and forward it to the auditor. Such a request would take four to five days to get completed, after which the organization got the update on the inventory status of its stores across three states.

Now, the Finance team uses cubes from Data Lake, and it takes only half an hour to complete an audit request. An auditor can now manage up to twenty requests with ease and the organization can have a quick view of the stock at its stores. 

Data integration for speedy and better decision-making

Another inefficient practice before integration was managing two data streams - offline data from the ERP system and online data. Data was sourced from different systems and then merged for stakeholder consumption. The entire process, which took three days, was ad-hoc and manual in nature, subject to risks and errors. It also spelled unnecessary delays in the decision-making process. An important area that suffered due to this was customer retention.

Leveraging Azure Databricks, the organization has created omnichannel dashboards, and currently the required data is provided in a matter of minutes. As a result, the organization can take quicker and better-quality decisions, providing an edge of agility to the business. The customer retention dashboard is refreshed five times every day for the consumption of omnichannel stakeholders.

The organization also used Databricks to build an employee scoring and incentive model for HR on top of Data Lake.

Empowered data analytics

Microsoft has served as a one stop solution partner for all data and analytics services at Wellness Forever. On a daily basis, the data analytics team receives myriads of requests from the promoters and directors on analytics, business intelligence or data extracts.

Traditionally, this was done through a chaotic process of multiple handoffs and manual activities. With Data Lake, the process has become simple and reliable at every step of data sharing. Wellness Forever creates complex analytics output in less time and has a lens that facilitates a single unified organizational view.

The Omnichannel team has created dashboards using Power BI, Data Factory and Data Lake, while the Marketing team has established customer cohorts leveraging Databricks. Microsoft has helped the data analytics team to grow in significant ways. 

Looking ahead

Wellness Forever has lined up a wide range of use cases from its integration platform for 2022-23 and beyond.

It is currently working on store analytics using Data Lake for deeper analyses of inventory and supply chain. Another interesting use case the organization is working on is using sensors in its stores to capture data on the equipment, run analytics on it to be able to manage temperatures better and build forecasting models. There are also plans to capture data from prescriptions and create customer profiles.