Elly Yates-Roberts |
Edible Arrangements is using Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics to grow its business by getting insights into its retail operations, supply chain and inventory demands, helping it to make more informed business decisions.
The US-based gift retailer best known for its bouquets of fruit serves approximately 100 million customers from its 2,000 stores and e-commerce platform, having grown from a single storefront in 2000. Its data centre processes an average of 50,000 orders each day, with this growing to between 800,000 and one million orders on gift-giving holidays.
Edible wanted to migrate its business processes to the cloud to give it the scalability, agility, insights and cost effectiveness that it needed to accommodate the massive amount of orders and data. It began working with Microsoft to build a new data warehouse with Azure Synapse Analytics.
According to Microsoft, the platform was a “natural choice” because it “combines data integration, enterprise data warehousing, big data analytics and a flexible querying system”.
“We used to have to do loops and hoops to get that data, transform it into a spreadsheet, set up some systems, and it would take a couple of days to dive into the data,” said Ilango Kasiraja, senior data architect at Edible Arrangements. “Diving into data is now on the fly. It’s very nearly in real time.”
Azure Synapse gives the business insight into its operations, supply chain, inventory demands and retail operations, enabling it to make more informed decisions based on data. Interoperation with Microsoft Power BI and machine learning also helps managers mitigate inventory shortages and reduce food waste.
“With Azure, we not only lessen the stress of maintaining and managing our infrastructure, but we can also better focus on business transformation and accelerate our speed to market on our digital, data, machine learning, and cognitive-related projects,” said Sai Padmanaban, vice president of technology at Edible Arrangements. “There are endless possibilities, and the sky is the limit for all the insights that we could derive from this platform.”