Rowan & Pike
A retailer with 140 branches and eleven spreadsheets. We rebuilt its sales data model and cut weekly reporting from three days to ten minutes.
Retail
- 10 min
- Weekly reporting, down from three days
- 140
- Branches on one trusted data model
- £310k
- Stock write-offs avoided in year one
The challenge
Rowan & Pike ran 140 branches, and every Monday a team of three spent most of the week stitching eleven spreadsheets into a sales report. By the time it reached the board, it was out of date, and two directors regularly quoted different revenue figures.
What we did
We started with a two-week discovery sprint, interviewing branch managers, finance and the buying team. We agreed one definition of revenue, margin and stock cover, and wrote them down.
Then we built a tested data model in BigQuery with dbt, loading till, stock and supplier data every night. A single Power BI report replaced the spreadsheets, with a one-page summary written in plain English each Monday.
The result
Weekly reporting now takes ten minutes of review instead of three days of assembly. Buyers spotted slow-moving lines earlier, which avoided an estimated £310,000 of write-offs in the first year. The board now argues about decisions, not about whose number is right.
Rowan & Pike is a fictional client created for this demo site. All figures are illustrative.
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