Mr Fothergill's Seeds

Business Intelligence Data Warehouse

Mr Fothergill’s is a large supplier of seeds in the United Kingdom. Many of their products can be bought in leading garden stores such as Homebase and online retailers including Amazon.

Mr Fothergill’s Seeds has been using Tableau for their financial reporting from Sage for a while. However, the business decided to move away from Tableau and into Power BI. They use Sage for their accounting software, but Mr Fothergill’s Seeds wanted to create a new SQL Server data warehouse with a restructured data layer, pulling data in from Sage to provide the Power BI reporting function.

The Solution

In accordance with the business' requirements, Dolphin IT Solutions built the new reporting data warehouse in a newly set up SQL Server 2019 instance, with developer-friendly table & column names (this is something surprisingly uncommon in enterprise applications). This solution allowed Mr Fothergill’s' Power BI developers to easily understand the data and quickly build out the dashboards.

We then designed an SSIS package (SQL Server Integration Service) to build the ETL process, by which the financial data from Sage is copied over from their live server, converted into the correct format, and stored in the reporting database. The ETL was set to occur every night.

Mr Fothergill’s also requested additional support for their Power BI development including features such as Row Level Security, in which each user can only see SQL data they are allowed to.

Dolphin IT Solutions then produced technical documentation and helpful advice to assist the Power BI developers working for Mr Fothergill’s.