Microsoft Azure helps to create a data-driven company
Industrial technology business Smiths Group operates in 50 countries globally and serves customers in 200 countries and territories. The company, which employs 22,000 people around the world, engineers products that people utilise everyday when using their phone, cooking dinner, heating their home, visiting the doctor or travelling by plane.
Smiths Group has five business divisions which have grown organically and through acquisitions and joint ventures. However, as a result of this growth, they each used different reporting systems and data storage, which meant that producing reports for the whole company or to get a holistic view of company data, employees had to manually extract data from different sources.
To streamline everything and gain visibility into the business data as a whole, Smiths Group turned to Microsoft Azure and particularly Azure Data Lake Storage to consolidate its data.
Ahmed Adnani, Director of Applications and Analytics, Smiths Group said: “With Azure, we now have the capability to rapidly drive value from our data. The actionable insights from the data models we’re creating will help us increase revenue, reduce costs, and minimise risk.”
Once the data was moved, into Azure Data Lake Storage, Smiths Group were able to transform it for reuse in Azure Databricks and then use Microsoft Power BI for reporting and analytics. This has reduced reporting time greatly and eliminated the errors that often occurred in manual reporting.
Adani said: “In Power BI, the reporting process is automated and analysts don’t have to spend time creating the report—they can instead focus on analyzing what it means. Our accounts payable and accounts receivable analysts just want to know their numbers for the month, and I used to spend five days each month running those reports. Now we have that time back because the information is just available with Power BI.”
Smiths Group classes itself as a data-driven organisation, using data to make strategic, informed business decisions. Adani concludes: “With Azure, we now have the capability to rapidly drive value from our data. The actionable insights from the data models we’re creating will help us increase revenue, reduce costs, and minimize risk.”
