Familia and IT Pro have created a hybrid analytics system

2021: Creating an analytical solution in the field of trade management

On April 28, 2021, the federal network of off-price stores Familia announced that, together with the developer of corporate IT Pro analytical systems, in a technological partnership with Microsoft, they created an analytical solution in the field of commodity management. It is constructed on the basis of the BI.Qube system and uses the last technologies of analytics of big data from oblakamicrosoft Azure. This tool, in particular, allowed Familia bayers to increase the speed of decision-making and the accuracy of the assessment of deliveries.

In a fraction of a second, the system analyzes a number of complex, contextually dependent metrics, due to which the procurement specialist has the opportunity to create recommendations for a transaction in real time. Thanks to this solution, Familia was able to improve the basing processes and increase the rate of replenishment of the assortment with current products at prices attractive to the buyer.

The IT solution is an important working tool for us, which is used daily by our large basing team. The speed of purchasing decisions is one of the key factors for successful competition in the global off-price market. How quickly the purchase decision is made, how accurately the risks and benefits are predicted depends on the financial effectiveness of the particular transaction, and in the end, the business as a whole. Thanks to IT Pro expertise and big data analysis tools from the Microsoft Azure cloud, we have received an important tool for daily work, which helps not only in making procurement decisions, but also in reporting and planning issues, "said Mikhail Vasilenko, Director of Technology at Familia.

The peculiarity of the system is that it is able to process arrays of disparate data: Familia works according to a special model, which is called off-price and assumes the presence in the assortment of a large range of various product items and a high speed of updating it. Given that several million SKUs are in circulation at the same time, as well as the number of network stores exceeding several hundred and constantly increasing, the system has to deal with new data arrays each time. To accelerate the analysis processes, the solution uses special architectural and technological approaches.

At the preparation stage in one month, a fully working prototype was created, based on real data for the year, which was scaled when moving to implementation, "said Dmitry Polikovsky, Director of IT Pro Development. - Using a robust and secure Microsoft Azure platform allowed us not only to reduce the cost of ownership of the analytical system by 40% thanks to a flexible plan to enable and disable services, but also to provide the customer with access to the latest big data analysis tools.

The convenience of using the system by business users is also that the format of working with the software for them has not changed dramatically - they can use the technology together with other Microsoft tools, including Excel, PowerPivot, OLAP cubes.