Imagine accurately predicting when and where your products will be in highest demand. You could minimize the risk of stockouts or overstocks and keep operations smooth and profits high. This level of precision is the dream of every supply chain professional but is especially crucial in the world of Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG). Unfortunately, traditional forecasting methods often hit roadblocks with data silos, delays, and complexity. But with emerging technologies like Microsoft Fabric, the game is changing.
As with many Supply Chain functions, quality data is the heart of effective demand planning.
Sell-out data—insights into actual consumer purchases—is especially valuable but also historically challenging to collect and aggregate. FMCG companies typically have to manage multiple disparate data sources, including point-of-sale (POS) systems, distributors, retailers, and e-commerce platforms. Each source often has its own data structure, format, and frequency, making it difficult to consolidate and analyze the data effectively. For instance, one retailer might provide daily sales data in a CSV format, while another might offer weekly reports in an entirely different format. On top of that, the data might be stored in different systems, creating silos that prevent a holistic view of sales performance.
This lack of integration can lead to incomplete or inaccurate demand forecasts, which in turn can result in costly mistakes such as overproduction, underproduction, or poor allocation of resources. The inability to see the full picture of consumer demand can cause stockouts, leading to lost sales and dissatisfied customers, or overstock situations, where valuable capital is tied up in excess inventory that may eventually need to be discounted or discarded.
Microsoft Fabric: A Unified Solution
This is where Microsoft Fabric comes in, offering a comprehensive solution to these integration challenges. Microsoft Fabric, an end-to-end data & analytics platform, is designed to unify data from multiple sources, breaking down those pesky silos and ensuring consistency across your organization. Imagine being able to pull data from your POS systems, ERP systems, online sales platforms, and even external sources like social media or market research, all into one place. Microsoft Fabric’s data integration capabilities make this possible, allowing you to consolidate diverse data streams into a single, cohesive platform.
Let’s break this down further with a real-world example. Suppose you’re managing demand planning for a leading FMCG company that sells products through various channels—retail stores, e-commerce platforms, and third-party distributors. Each of these channels generates a wealth of data, but in different formats and frequencies. With Microsoft Fabric, you can use over 145 different data connectors to seamlessly pull in data from each of these sources. Whether it’s a CSV file from a retailer’s POS system, data from your in-house ERP system, or sales data from an e-commerce platform like Amazon, Fabric can integrate it all. This means you’re no longer flying blind—every piece of relevant data is at your fingertips, ready to be analyzed and used to forecast demand with greater accuracy.
Fabric Medallion Architecture: How We Organize Data
So, how does Microsoft Fabric organize all this data to make it useful? This is where the Fabric Medallion Architecture comes into play. The Medallion Architecture is a structured approach that organizes data into three distinct layers: Bronze, Silver, and Gold.
Bronze Layer: This is where your raw, unprocessed data lives. It’s like the raw ore in a mining operation—valuable but not yet ready for use. For example, this might include unfiltered sales data from various retail outlets or initial feeds from your e-commerce platforms.
Silver Layer: In this layer, the data is cleaned and transformed. Think of it as the refining process, where impurities are removed, and the data is standardized. In practical terms, this means removing duplicates, correcting errors, and harmonizing the data so that it’s consistent and reliable. For example, you might standardize product names and SKUs across various sources, ensuring that data from various retailers can be compared and analyzed together.
Gold Layer: Finally, the refined data moves to the Gold Layer, where it becomes enriched, high-quality information ready for advanced analytics and reporting. This is the pure, valuable gold that can be used to drive strategic decision-making. For instance, in the Gold Layer, you might build sophisticated demand forecasting models that can predict future sales trends based on historical data, seasonal patterns, and external factors like promotions or economic conditions.
By organizing data through these layers, Microsoft Fabric ensures that your data is progressively refined and reliable, making it the perfect foundation for demand planning and replenishment in the FMCG sector. Whether you’re analyzing past sales to forecast future demand or identifying trends in consumer behavior, the Medallion Architecture ensures that you’re working with data that is accurate, consistent, and actionable.
Pipelines: How We Move Data
But data doesn’t move through these layers on its own. Think of data pipelines as the highways that transport your data from one layer to the next. Pipelines carry raw data to the Bronze Layer, where it’s collected, then move it to the Silver Layer for cleaning and organizing, and finally deliver it to the Gold Layer, where it’s ready for analysis and insight generation.
These pipelines automate and optimize data processing, ensuring that your data flows smoothly and remains high quality at every stage. For an FMCG company, this means better demand forecasting and optimized replenishment processes. With data pipelines in place, you better your chances of nailing demand forecasts, that your products are always in stock , reducing the risk of stockouts, which can lead to lost sales, or overstock situations, where excess inventory ties up valuable resources.
Let’s say you’re preparing for a major holiday season, and you need to forecast demand for a specific product line. Using the pipelines in Microsoft Fabric, you can automatically pull data from various sources—such as last year’s sales data, current inventory levels, and market trends—into the Bronze Layer. The data is then cleaned and standardized in the Silver Layer, ensuring that it’s accurate and comparable across different channels. Finally, in the Gold Layer, this data is used to build a forecast that predicts how much of each product you’ll need to meet customer demand. The entire process is streamlined, automated, and optimized, allowing you to make data-driven decisions quickly and efficiently.
Lakehouses: How We Store Data
Now, where does all this data live as it moves through these layers? Enter the Lakehouse—a supercharged storage space that combines the best features of data lakes and data warehouses. Imagine a giant, organized closet where you can store all kinds of data, whether it’s messy and raw or neatly structured.
The beauty of a Lakehouse is that it keeps everything in one place while making it easy to find and use what you need. In the context of FMCG demand planning, all your sales data, inventory data, market research, and more are stored in a single, easily accessible location. As data moves through the Bronze, Silver, and Gold Layers, it’s stored in the lakehouse, ready to be used for analysis and decision-making.
Why does this matter? In today’s world, businesses are flooded with data, and a lakehouse helps them store and manage it all efficiently. It’s the perfect spot for your data to settle before it gets refined and analyzed, just like in the Bronze, Silver, and Gold Layers we talked about earlier. So, if data pipelines are highways, the lakehouse is the final stop—a place where your data can be neatly stored, organized, and ready to fuel important business insights, like predicting demand in FMCG.
Leveraging the Power Platform Ecosystem
One of the most valuable components of Microsoft Fabric is how well it plays with other Power Platform tools. For instance, with Power BI, you can create interactive dashboards to quickly visualize Fabric data. Imagine having a real-time dashboard that shows you sales trends, inventory levels, and demand forecasts, all in one place. This enables stakeholders to gain insights quickly and easily, allowing them to make informed decisions on the fly.
Additionally, Power Apps can be used to build custom tools for demand planning, such as apps for managing exceptions or facilitating collaboration across teams. For example, you could create an app that notifies key team members when inventory levels are low, prompting them to act before stockouts occur. This interconnected ecosystem helps streamline the demand planning process and supports data-driven decisions, making your supply chain more responsive and agile.
Leave no Loose Ends
Microsoft Fabric is a meaningful change for FMCG companies, providing a powerful platform for integrating and analyzing sell-out data. By leveraging this technology, businesses can sharpen their demand planning, optimize their supply chains, and gain a competitive edge. Whether you’re dealing with the challenges of integrating data from multiple sources, refining that data through the Medallion Architecture, or storing it efficiently in a lakehouse, Microsoft Fabric offers the tools you need to stay ahead in the fast-paced world of FMCG.
If you want to learn how to use Microsoft Fabric, register to our next Fabric Analyst in a Day in Austin:
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