How a regional retail chain saved USD 900K by moving its reporting onto one Hive data platform

01At a glance

02The challenge

Our reports came from nine systems: store tills, e-commerce, the warehouse, finance and five others. Every Monday, analysts spent two days stitching exports together before anyone could see last week’s sales, and each department’s numbers told a different story. We were paying for licences and servers that nobody fully used, and our BI team could not take on new requests. Leadership wanted daily numbers across stores and online, and a platform we could grow into without adding people.

03What we did

We designed a unified data platform on Hive, with ALTeX Hub handling ingestion, quality checks and access control. Our data engineers built pipelines from all nine source systems, agreed one data model for sales, stock and margin with the business, and moved the 120 most-used reports onto it. As each report moved across, we retired the duplicate data feeds and the licences they needed. A team of five, three data engineers, a BI developer and an architect, worked in two-week sprints with the client’s BI team and trained them to run the platform. The first dashboards went live in week ten, and every report now refreshes overnight.

04What we found

05The result

• USD 900K saved
• First dashboards live in 10 weeks
• Store, e-commerce and finance data in one platform, from 9 separate systems

06In their words

07What’s next

The platform now feeds demand forecasting, and the client has moved two more countries onto it.