Success Story: ATB Market

In the 2000s, Ukrainian retailer ATB Market introduced a new, heavily discounted, high-convenience self-service shopping system to Ukrainian families. This format was a great success, and the firm is now offering high-quality products in over 1,200 locations across the country.

“A daily task for a store manager is to locally oversee the success of some product categories, such as bakery, which are not covered by the main ATB Market central ordering department. This is particularly important for holiday sales,” explains Denis Saparbaev, Head of Analytics at ATB Market. “Store managers also need to be well informed about goods losses, cashier efficiency, new products added to assortments, and so on. These used to be covered by a huge number of reports and emails with static data, so it was very hard to get the necessary insights and to compare data for different time periods.”

In response, ATB Market created dashboards that reflect a useful spread of data points—from number of shoppers, historical sales success for products, to the amount of electricity a store uses. This is done using Microsoft Power BI Embedded and Azure Data Lake Analytics services.

Improved sales efficiency

“To have more effective stock management and promotions at local store level, and reduce the time spent on searching data in email archives, we needed tools that could compare actual data with targets,” explains Saparbaev. “So, we asked our local business IT partner, SMART business, to develop some for us.”

SMART business successfully married the wide set of existing ATB Market enterprise resource planning (ERP) and database feeds into one convenient, easy-to-use local manager support system. As a result, the company can create forecasts and reports much faster, while ATB Market’s head office benefits from consolidated reports with quick integration of local data into its central finance systems.

All ATB Market stores are now running on Power BI Embedded, and similar projects have been started in several other departments, including Purchasing and Service Desk.

“Using Microsoft cloud technology to do this is five to six times cheaper than our previous solution, and our managers tell us the time they spend on generating business reports has been at least cut in half,” says Saparbaev. “We now have much more flexibility in reports and a better user experience, while local store sales and promotions are going much more smoothly. We also have fully accurate product loss or sale deviation information at the central level.”

The company looks forward to increasingly ongoing, positive results. “Using Microsoft–based data solutions has reduced wasted time and improved our overall sales efficiency,” Saparbaev concludes.

Additional information

SMART business provides services on development, maintenance and training of the ERP and CRM systems, systems based on predicative analytics and artificial intelligence. For 10 years, the company has been consulting and creating proprietary solutions based on Microsoft products, including Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Power BI, as well as Data and AI technologies. SMART business has guided digital transformation in companies of different sizes, across different industries and sectors in more than 60 countries worldwide.