Case Study: From Spreadsheets to Insights - A Custom BI Dashboard for a Dallas Retailer

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Meerako — Dallas, TX experts in building custom Business Intelligence platforms that drive growth.

Introduction

A successful, multi-location Dallas-based retail chain came to Meerako drowning in data but starved for insights. Their executive team was spending days every month manually pulling reports from different systems:

• Point-of-Sale (POS) system (for sales data)
• Inventory Management system
• E-commerce platform (Shopify)
• Marketing tools (Google Analytics, Email provider)

They would dump this into massive Excel spreadsheets, trying to piece together a picture of their business health. It was slow, error-prone, and they could never get a real-time view.

They needed a single source of truth—a custom BI dashboard that integrated all their data and presented it visually, allowing them to make faster, smarter decisions.

What You'll Learn

• The specific pain points of the retailer's manual reporting.
• How Meerako designed a custom data warehouse and BI platform on AWS.
• Examples of the key visualizations and KPIs we built.
• The measurable impact: Faster decisions, optimized inventory, higher ROI.

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The Challenge: Data Silos & Manual Reporting

• No Real-Time View: Decisions were based on last month's spreadsheets.
• Inconsistent Data: Product names or customer IDs didn't match across systems.
• Wasted Time: Highly paid executives were spending hours doing low-value data entry.
• Missed Opportunities: They couldn't easily see which marketing campaigns drove in-store sales, or which products were selling best right now in their Uptown vs. Plano locations.

The Meerako Solution: A Custom AWS Data Platform & Next.js Dashboard

1. Data Integration & Warehousing

• We used AWS Glue (an ETL service) to automatically extract data nightly from the POS, Inventory, Shopify, and Marketing APIs.
• We cleaned, transformed, and unified this data (e.g., standardizing product SKUs) and loaded it into a central Amazon Redshift data warehouse. This became the single source of truth.

2. The Custom BI Dashboard

• We built a secure, blazing-fast web application using Next.js and AWS Lambda.
• Our UI/UX team worked directly with the client's executives to design visualizations that answered their specific questions.
• We used libraries like Chart.js and D3.js to create interactive charts and graphs far beyond what a generic tool could offer.

Key Dashboard Features:

• Executive Overview: Real-time sales vs. target (overall and per-location), inventory levels, top-performing products.
• Marketing ROI: Tracked campaign spend vs. attributed revenue (both online and in-store, using coupon code data).
• Inventory Optimization: Flagged slow-moving items and predicted stock-outs based on current sales velocity.
• Customer Segmentation: Identified top customer segments based on purchase history and lifetime value.

The Measurable Results

The impact of having real-time, unified data was transformative:

• Reporting Time Reduced by 95%: What took days now took seconds.
• Improved Inventory Turnover: Optimized stock levels reduced carrying costs by 15%.
• Increased Marketing ROI: Able to shift ad spend to the most profitable channels, boosting ROI by 25%.
• Data-Driven Decisions: Executives could now confidently make decisions about pricing, promotions, and staffing based on live data, not month-old guesses.

Conclusion

Your data is your most valuable asset, but only if you can access and understand it. For this Dallas retailer, moving from "spreadsheet hell" to a custom BI dashboard built by Meerako unlocked significant, measurable improvements in efficiency, profitability, and strategic decision-making.

Off-the-shelf tools provide generic reports. Meerako builds custom intelligence engines tailored to your unique business.

Ready to unlock the power hidden in your data?

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🧠 Meerako — Your Trusted Dallas Technology Partner.

From concept to scale, we deliver world-class SaaS, web, and AI solutions.

📞 Call us at +1 469-336-9968 or 💌 email [email protected] for a free consultation.

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