Greatest customer proximity thanks to Power BI in the Cloud

To be able to continue providing this first-class service, Oswald employees depend on reliable data on customers and sales, products and delivery times. Oswald already implemented a BI portal with Trivadis 10 years ago, which provides in-house and field staff with the analyses they need. Oswald’s infrastructure had become quite outdated, so the time had come for it to be standardised and modernised. After extensive consultation with Trivadis, Oswald decided to migrate the existing systems to the Azure Cloud.

Trivadis migrated the 13 databases that used to run on an MSSQL server On-Premises to four virtual machines in the Azure Cloud, where they are now available for operation as IaaS. As part of this process, the outdated reports were modernised and simplified in order to offer better performance and implement expansions that had been pending for a long time. The access rights were also re-segmented so that access to the reports is restricted by department. An Oswaldspecific Silverlight in-house development for the sales force was also successfully ported to modern technologies and the foundation for further extensions has been laid.

Another requirement involved further development of the existing BI platform and the integration of new functionalities. The aim of this is to eliminate or clean up redundant reports. For this purpose, together with Oswald, we first analysed which reports are required in what form and whether the data required for this is reliably available. The modern infrastructure in the Cloud also offers noticeable relief for Oswald’s IT team, as they no longer have to take care of an infrastructure on the premises.

For the systems operation in the Cloud, we provide Oswald with support services under a service level agreement. Service requests are also no longer received, processed and logged by the in-house IT department; the Trivadis Service Desk takes care of this. Thanks to these measures, Oswald was able to reduce its project, license and operating costs.

With the new BI solution, Oswald’s employees receive all the information they need for their daily work via a central platform. Thanks to the simpler systems, the effort required to analyse the data is reduced and the IT team can concentrate on other tasks. All in all, the new solutions enable the company to react much faster and more reliably to market requirements and save costs at the same time.

Oswald GmbH was founded almost 70 years ago and sees itself as a specialist for seasoning products and bouillons. In recent years, it has developed from a small family business into a modern food company. The company employs around 250 people, 150 of whom are field staff. It sells products in Switzerland and Europe.