About Our Customer
Our customer stands as an eminent leader in the homeware segment, embodying a legacy of excellence and innovation. Renowned for its unwavering commitment to quality and customer satisfaction, the company has garnered numerous accolades, including the prestigious IHA Global Innovation Award and the esteemed recognition as a Trusted Brand by Reader’s Digest. With a steadfast dedication to innovation and passion for delivering superior products, our customer continues to set benchmarks in the homeware industry.
Challenges Faced by the Customer-
Our customer faced challenges in managing vast amounts of sales data across multiple regions and stores. The process of collecting and analyzing data was cumbersome, leading to inefficiencies in inventory management and brand positioning strategies.
- To develop an Image Text Extraction and Translation system that can capture text from images in various languages like English, Chinese, Spanish and Japanese and convert it into English for output.
- The image captured and data entry processes are manual, and it is leading to data entry errors, duplication, & inconsistencies.
- No proper Document Management Repository (DMS) is in place.
- The lack of centralized image data access, insights, tracking, monitoring and advanced analysis.
- Employees spend considerable time managing image data, reducing productivity and efficiency
- No maker and checker validation on the image attributes.
Solution Strategy
The proposed solution leveraged Microsoft Azure to develop an application that facilitates seamless data collection and analysis. Key features included:
- Admin functionalities such as creating master lists for regions and stores, adding sales executives to specific regions, and generating comprehensive reports.
- Employee functionalities allowing sales executives to capture in-store data, including image capture with quality check and session management for data tagging.
- Azure Cognitive Services for automated data extraction from images, language identification, and translation, enhancing data accuracy and operational efficiency.
- Data storage and reporting utilizing Azure SQL for storing output data and Azure Blob Storage for images, with a reporting module for generating insightful brand performance reports.
Tools and Technologies Used-
- Power App for Sales Executives: A mobile interface enables sales teams to select stores and capture images of store shelves, streamlining data collection.
- Power Automate Workflow: Orchestrates the process flow from image capture to data processing, enhancing efficiency and minimizing manual errors.
- Azure Cognitive Services Integration: Utilizes the Form Recognizer to automatically extract text from the captured images, increasing the speed of data entry.
- Azure OpenAI Application: Interprets the extracted text for product counts, providing insights into brand performance across different stores.
- Azure SQL Database: Acts as the backbone for storing structured data, ensuring integrity and accessibility for reporting and analysis.
- Azure Blob Storage: Safely stores the captured images and serves as a repository for any unstructured data.
- Admin Master Interface: Allows administrators to manage master data and gain insights with the ability to view brand counts by store and region and to export reports in CSV format.
- Multi-Layered Data Management: SQL connectors ensure seamless integration between different data sources and the application layers, creating a unified system for data management.
- Scalable Azure Infrastructure: The use of Azure subscriptions provides scalability to accommodate the growth of Hamilton Housewares, ensuring that the infrastructure can grow with the company’s expanding needs.
Implementation
The implementation focused on creating a user-friendly interface for both admins and employees, integrating Azure services for data processing and storage, and establishing a secure and scalable architecture.
Results and Impact
The digital transformation initiative by our customer resulted in:
- Streamlined Data Collection: Simplified the process of capturing and submitting in-store data.
- Enhanced Data Analysis: Automated data extraction and analysis led to actionable insights for brand management.
- Increased Efficiency: Reduced manual effort and improved accuracy in sales and inventory management.
Conclusion
Our customer’s adoption of Microsoft Azure for digital transformation signifies a strategic move towards data-driven decision-making. This case study exemplifies how cloud technology can revolutionize operations and provide competitive advantages in the consumer goods sector.
