Retail data solutions architecture
Retail data solutions are an industry specific workload on top of Microsoft Fabric for unifying, enriching, and modeling industry data on Fabric. Retailers can also take advantage of the available list of connectors, application templates, and business intelligence capabilities, which can be configured easily.
Benefits of Retail data solutions
Retail data solutions offer application templates tailored for retail-specific scenarios, accelerating time to market. These templates serve as customizable and extendable starter kits, allowing retailers to adapt them to their unique requirements. Additionally, application templates and connectors from specialized SI partners are available, consolidating best-of-breed solutions in one location. All developed capabilities are deeply interconnected, enabling the seamless use of data to produce unique insights that can't be achieved in isolation.
Retail data solutions enable retailers to:
- Improve their bottom line by driving operational efficiencies.
- Standardize and harmonize their data estate and store their data in industry data model template provided.
- Bring data from varied set of applications through various connectors that are provided out of the box.
- Generate valuable insights to actions by applying the data available in the standardized data model.
Retail data solutions - Reference architecture
Microsoft Cloud for Retail provides a reference architecture for Retail data solutions. It provides an overview of common and recommended implementation technology choices, terminology, technology principles, common configuration environments, and composition of applicable services.
Download a printable PDF of this reference architecture diagram.
The key stages/dataflow are as follows:
Data sources
In a retail organization, the fundamental sources of data encompass a wide range of systems and platforms. These sources include Point of Sale (POS) systems, loyalty programs, eCommerce platforms, email marketing tools, employee data, retail mobile applications, inventory management systems, product catalogs, supply chain information, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, Customer Engagement (on-premise) (CE) platforms, surveys, feedback forms, and social media interactions.
Retailers aim to integrate data from their diverse operational systems into retail data solutions to gain valuable insights and actions. This integration can be achieved through a combination of first-party (1P) connectors from Microsoft Cloud for Retail, third-party (3P) connectors developed by partner ecosystems, and Fabric out-of-the-box (OOB) connectors.
The Sitecore OrderCloud data connector can be used to bring commerce data from Sitecore OrderCloud (preview) into Microsoft Fabric in real time. The connector with Sitecore OrderCloud gives a quick and reliable platform to get commerce data for three important areas: product, customer, and orders. The connector performs transformation and orchestration on top of the data from Sitecore OrderCloud to map it to retail industry data model, reducing engineering effort, and accelerating time to insights.
Customer tenant in Microsoft Fabric
Microsoft Fabric represents an end-to-end, integrated analytics platform that consolidates a comprehensive suite of data and analytics tools that are essential for organizations to harness the full potential of their data. Microsoft Fabric provides all-in-one solution for data integration, data engineering, real-time analytics, data science, and business intelligence needs without compromising the privacy and security of your data. With Microsoft Fabric, retailers can access, process, analyze, and visualize data from various sources and scales, without worrying about the underlying infrastructure or complexity.
Data ingestion - Exchange and transform
Retailers have the capability to pull data from various sources into Fabric using either Microsoft Fabric Eventstream or Lakehouse. These data ingestion methods serve as the foundation for conducting advanced analytics or real-time analytics.
Fabric Eventstream feature in Microsoft Fabric gives you a centralized place in the Fabric platform to capture, transform, and route real-time events to various destinations with a no-code experience. This destination provides you with the ability to transform your real-time events before ingestion into your lakehouse.
Real-time events convert data and store it in the designated Fabric Lakehouse tables. Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse is a data architecture platform for storing, managing, and analyzing structured and unstructured data in a single location. It's a flexible and scalable solution that allows organizations to handle large volumes of data using various tools and frameworks to process and analyze that data.
Microsoft Industry Data Models (IDMs) enables data product interoperability. IDMs help you organize the way your data is shaped and shared and ensure that it meets industry-wide standards. It provides a shared data language for business and analytical applications to use.
Retail data estate
Data serves as the bedrock for retailers, enabling them to derive valuable insights, take informed actions, and harness the power of cutting-edge LLM and Copilot experiences. The Industry Data Model provides a standardized and harmonized schema for managing retail-related data.
Retail Data Model is a blueprint used by retailers to plan, architect, and design data solutions for data governance, reporting, business intelligence, and advance analytics. This key capability of the Retail Data Solutions in Azure Synapse allows retailers to use the full or subset of the data model to meet their specific needs.
Microsoft OneLake is built into the Fabric service and provides a unified location to store all organizational data where the experiences operate. OneLake is built on top of Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2 and can support any type of file, structured or unstructured. All Fabric data items like data warehouses and lakehouses store their data automatically in OneLake.
Fabric Data warehouse workloads benefit from the rich capabilities of the SQL engine over an open data format, enabling customers to focus on data preparation, analysis, and reporting over a single copy of their data stored in their Microsoft OneLake.
Analytics and AI
After you have access to data within the Retail Industry Data Model, you can use a range of AI/ML models and perform analytics. By utilizing both first-party (1P) and third-party (3P) capabilities offered by partners, you can obtain top-tier solutions tailored to your business requirements.
Dynamics 365 Commerce Analytics enables organizations to make informed data-driven decisions about their business with rich insights from transactional data and from behavioral e-commerce user data.
Frequently bought together AI model empowers the store or the merchandising manager to make data-driven decisions on products’ placement and promotions, based on insights on closely related products, so that retailers can effectively promote cross-selling activity and boost joint sales.
Interactive visualizations
Frequently bought together model Power BI report provides a rich set of information and insights on its user interface (UI). The Product Groupings view provides analytics based on the product's Frequently bought together revenue KPI.
Dynamics 365 Commerce reports can help retailers generate and view several reports in Commerce to see how your online channel is performing.
For more information, see, Overview of Retail data solutions in Microsoft Fabric (preview)
Microsoft Fabric Copilot
Copilot capabilities in Microsoft Fabric bring new ways to transform and analyze data, generate insights, and create visualizations and reports in Microsoft Fabric and Power BI.