UK retailer, Marks and Spencer, uses Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI to drive powerful insights

M&S’s journey with data

With technology and innovation at the heart of M&S’s business, data has increasingly become key to improving customer and colleague experiences. Due to its scale, M&S deals with huge amounts of data. From supply chain logistics to retail shopping metrics, M&S aims to integrate relevant data into all decision-making across the business—and so opening up access to relevant, high-quality data is crucial for its growth and operations.

At the beginning of its data journey, M&S had many disparate data homes across the organization and underwent a project to consolidate data into an on-premises data environment to support analytics across the organization. While adoption of this project was successful and a substantial percentage of data was consolidated into a single platform, M&S’s legacy system continued to support many analytics processes and reporting initiatives. With remaining on-premises data, it became difficult to keep up with customer and retail demands in real time, while also trying to scale systems and reporting. Wanting to move beyond the strain and costs of on-premises systems, M&S started its cloud journey to migrating the remainder of its legacy systems and data to the cloud.

Now, M&S has established BEAM, its cloud data platform and the home of its data tooling, the data itself and the new capabilities and solutions it is powering. BEAM is enabling new capabilities through data science and analytics solutions across the business to better serve customers and colleagues, and supporting M&S’s efforts to democratize data for all, giving teams access to the reporting needed to enable faster, better decisions as part of continued data transformation at M&S.

Finding the right solution to foster a data-driven culture

For M&S, having data architecture that could efficiently support and process its organizational and operational data while also handling scale and speed was key. M&S felt that Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics could keep up with performance requirements, provide necessary scale and serve as a strong foundation for the BI analytics platform, all while remaining the most cost-effective option. Plus, with Microsoft Power BI as the primary reporting tool, the easy integration made the choice of Synapse feel even easier. Synapse stood out for its query execution performance within selected capacity, Power BI connectivity and performance, and easy data orchestration abilities.

After choosing Azure Synapse Analytics for its cloud data platform, the BEAM team worked closely with Microsoft to build the architecture. M&S source data originates in many different locations: legacy data, third party applications, IOT devices, streaming data, and more. Raw source data is moved to an Azure Data Lake via a workflow manager. Within Azure Data Lake, data is cleaned and modeled. Azure Databricks and Spark notebooks help transform data even further. After data is transformed, it is then orchestrated into Azure Synapse Analytics via Azure Data Factory. After data has been modeled for reporting, it is ingested into Power BI to serve the numerous reports across M&S.

Taking reporting to the next level and enabling data-driven decisions with Power BI

Making relevant data more accessible for its colleagues to make faster, better decisions is integral to success at M&S and plays a key part in driving cultural change. 

Power BI has now reached all corners of the organization, with reports and dashboards serving a large variety of needs. From within the BEAM team, a central analytics team guides reporting initiatives and supports organizational standards for best practices across M&S. Paired with self-service reporting, the central analytics team uses Power BI to build large reports across the organization and help federated teams find solutions for more niche reporting use cases. With numerous reporting initiatives across the organization, data and high-quality analytics are now easily accessible. However, to drive business value, this work is supported by an Adoption & Education arm, BEAM Academy, to drive change through colleagues.

One of the bigger reports that the central analytics team built was the Stock Movement Tool, a reporting solution that shows how food goods move through the supply chain. The previous tool didn’t quite fit the needs of analysts and business users and was costly to maintain. Getting real time data through reports took a long time and made it difficult for analysts to make timely decisions on goods within the supply chain. To keep up with demands, users needed a real-time solution. Now, with Power BI, users can access insights at a click that are real-time—a huge improvement. Stock Movement Tool reports are also embedded into a web portal so suppliers can access and track data too, enabling more effective collaboration between partners.

For retail colleagues on the frontline, especially management, Power BI Premium capacities support an app where they can access and interrogate reports to look at insight such as sales and stock metrics, operational performance, people data and more. The reports within the app are accessed by 2,000 colleagues every week, and help stores run more efficiently, more commercially and build a better experience for customers.

Building a knowledge base across the organization

When M&S was first ramping up Power BI adoption, the BEAM Academy developed a two-week event to engage and educate thousands of their support centre colleagues on Power BI—covering numerous use cases and topics for both citizen and practitioner audiences. This highly rated event was a real step change moment for colleagues and Power BI and led to a similar event for all of M&S’s frontline retail managers on their bespoke reporting.

This was a key starting point for BEAM Academy that reinforced colleagues’ appetite and requirements for a broader proposition: a place for colleagues to receive learning and support on tools within the BEAM ecosystem to really get the most out of it. BEAM Academy now hosts many programs including industry-leading data apprenticeships, live learning events and workshops, hackathons, and more—supporting company-wide adoption and value back to the business through getting the most out of data.

This has resulted in colleagues being inspired and empowered to build their own reports and serve their own specific analytics needs, seeing self-service reporting across the organization growing tremendously. To really enable this further, M&S has a focus on adoption to make the transition between technologies and new behaviours easier—especially for the community of analysts and colleagues actively interrogating data in their roles across the business to get the most out of data and reporting for their business areas.

Striving to expand the data platform

Since the introduction of the Synapse and Power BI platform, adoption of Power BI has grown significantly with more than 2,000 colleagues across M&S having created their first report. This has enabled over 11,000 support centre and store management colleagues who are actively using reporting each month to support decision-making. Now, analysts can access data quickly to help make important, actionable decisions that help build a seamless omnichannel experience for customers. With Synapse and Power BI, data orchestration is seamless and easy, and automation of data pipelines and reports enables colleagues to focus on how they can better serve customers. For our store colleagues, it enables them to spend more actual time directly serving customers.  

“Synapse is incredibly fast when properly optimised, and the integration with Power BI…massively outperforms any other tool we’ve looked at. This combination ensures the reporting products built on our platform are robust, supportable, and can be relied on,” says Rebecca Noonan, Data Exploitation Manager at Marks & Spencer.

As M&S continues building out its data platform and enabling more colleagues to access and benefit from data, the organization plans to keep innovation at the core of retail operations, and leverage data to deliver even more value to its customers.

“Having all of our data in one single place, that is clean and performant, has allowed us to quickly build reporting and dashboards that are able to refresh considerably quicker than our legacy on-premise platforms, ultimately helping improve the speed to insight for the business," says Anthony Reed, Foods Data Product Manager. 

M&S’s data transformation journey is ongoing, but the organization is forging ahead with a clear focus on driving more value to customers and colleagues through technology, data, and its people.