In today’s highly competitive business landscape, data is the lifeblood of customer success.
While organisations possess vast quantities of data, they often lack the capacity to transform this raw information into actionable strategic insights due to siloed data strategies.
C-suite executives and board members need timely, accurate data to make informed decisions, but often find themselves drowning in outdated information derived from labour-intensive manual processes. The inability to gain real-time insights ultimately impacts the bottom line.
Gartner reveals that poor data quality costs organisations an average of $12.9 million every year
53% of business leaders worldwide recognise that organisations that fail to use data and AI effectively will lose their competitive edge and be eliminated from the market, according to Fujitsu’s 2024 Sustainability Transformation with AI Report.
The story of Baby Bunting, Australia’s largest nursery and maternity retailer, illustrates how its collaboration with Fujitsu, harnessing a unified, cloud-based data platform, can optimise their business intelligence capabilities.
This approach empowers organisations to automate their manual processes for senior reporting to make faster, more informed decisions, maintaining a competitive edge in an increasingly crowded market.
- The challenge: Bridging data gaps to accelerate growth
Like many organisations, Baby Bunting’s existing multiple sources of disparate data which needed to be integrated across multiple business sources and applications, led to time-consuming, manual processes for board-level reports.
With rising consumer demand for online shopping, and their expansion into the New Zealand market, the company needed to quickly streamline and automate its reporting systems to support accurate business decision-making.
Challenges Baby Bunting faced included:
· Inefficient business insight generation: Slow, manual reporting across multiple platforms delayed critical decision-making.
· Inconsistent data analysis: Disparate data sources across made it difficult to gain a unified view of the business, hindering accurate analysis and strategic planning to drive business growth.
· Lack of real-time insights: Delayed reporting cycles meant decisions were being made based on outdated information.
- The solution: A unified, automated, cloud-based reporting source
In collaboration with Fujitsu, Baby Bunting transitioned to a modern, cloud-based data infrastructure, centralising its reporting and analytics on one unified platform.
This solution, built on Microsoft Azure with Power BI and powered by Fujitsu’s expertise, provided:
· One-stop shop for data: All of Baby Bunting’s data, from sales and inventory to promotions and financials, was brought together in one place, creating a “single source of truth.” This included streamlining data from both their Australian and New Zealand operations, even handling different currencies.
· Automated reports: Instead of manually compiling reports, Baby Bunting now has automated systems that generate up-to-the-minute reports on key metrics, freeing up valuable time and resources.
· Easy-to-use executive dashboards: Fujitsu created user-friendly, visual dashboards that give Baby Bunting’s team clear, real-time visibility into their business performance, empowering them to make faster, more informed decisions. This also allows individual team members to analyse and interrogate data themselves, without needing to rely on central reporting teams.
· Ongoing support: Fujitsu’s Platform Managed Service provides ongoing management and support for the platform, so Baby Bunting can focus on their core business, not managing complex technology.
- The result: Data-driven business growth and significant cost savings
The impact of Fujitsu’s solution was significant, resulting in:
· Reduced reporting time: Baby Bunting dramatically decreased the time spent on manual report generation, freeing up valuable resources.
· Improved decision-making speed: Access to real-time data enabled faster, more informed decisions, leading to increased agility and responsiveness to market changes.
· Achieved sustainable business growth: The improved insights directly contributed to measurable business growth, such as increased sales or market share.
- Building a foundation for data-driven success with Fujitsu
As Baby Bunting looks to the future, a unified, robust data platform will remain a cornerstone of its strategy, enabling continued growth, improved operational efficiency, and enhanced customer satisfaction across both Australian and New Zealand markets.
By implementing an automated board reporting dataset, organisations can eliminate manual processes, move beyond the limitations of Excel spreadsheets, and gain access to continually refreshed, real-time insights. This empowers businesses to:
· Make faster, data-driven decisions: Access up-to-the-minute data and eliminate delays associated with manual reporting cycles.
· Improve operational efficiency and reduce costs: Free up valuable resources previously dedicated to tedious manual reporting tasks, allowing them to focus on higher-value activities. Reduce the risk of errors inherent in manual processes.
· Build a secure, single source of truth for reporting: Consolidate disparate data sources into a centralised, secure repository, ensuring data consistency and reliability.\
· Streamline board reporting: Generate key board pack components automatically, eliminating manual effort and ensuring data accuracy.
This article was contributed by Bill Coleman, Lead Specialist – Power Platform at Fujitsu.