R.S. Hughes, a leading retail distributor specializing in industrial supplies, faced a pivotal challenge. Known as the largest seller of 3M products in North America, the company was burdened by an ageing on-premises reporting system that needed to be improved and sooner than later.

Recognizing this urgency, R.S. Hughes embarked on a transformative journey to revolutionize its reporting infrastructure, in an effort that coincided with the company’s ground-to-cloud ERP migration. It required the organization to rethink their approach to reporting and analytics, ensuring that any solution they chose would support the challenges of an upgraded ERP system and lay a foundation for future growth.

For more than a decade, R.S. Hughes had relied on an on-premises implementation using Hyperion to generate essential business reports. The process was burdened with inefficiency and potential inaccuracy, with employees manually extracting data and processing it in Excel. Although the approach provided basic insights, it was a time-consuming and error-prone process that did not scale with the company’s needs.

“We knew our reporting system was outdated,” said the R.S. Hughes IT leader. “We had some robust reporting needs that had been put on the back burner for a long time. And there was nothing native in our new ERP that would give us the reporting that we needed,” he said.

Beyond the technical debt in the current reporting system, R.S. Hughes’ small IT team faced significant resource constraints. They lacked in-house expertise in modern data tools like Power BI to design and implement a new reporting system on their own. Additionally, the company needed to standardize their reporting policies and address security concerns as part of the broader cloud modernization effort. 

Download the case study to see how JourneyTeam helped R.S. Hughes Take advantage of Microsoft Azure Data Lake and Power BI.