Smiths Group unites data from five global divisions and hundreds of apps with Azure Data Lake Storage

When you travel by air, visit the doctor, use your phone, cook a meal, or heat your home, you may be using Smiths Group products without realizing it. Whether scanners at airports, medical devices in hospitals, or connectivity solutions for satellites, Smiths Group engineers products that help the modern world work. Founded in 1851, the company has a long history of growing and evolving with the changing needs of its customers. 

Today, Smiths Group is a global company that operates in 50 countries. Its five business divisions have grown organically and through acquisitions and joint ventures. Each division used different reporting systems and data storage, for a combined total of 800 applications across the company. To produce some reports, or to gain a holistic view of the company’s data, Smiths Group employees had to manually extract data from many sources.

Consolidating disparate systems 

Ready to update its IT landscape, Smiths Group met with Microsoft in August 2018 to begin exploring options. The company decided to use Microsoft Azure Data Lake Storage to consolidate its data from multiple business divisions and data sources, including enterprise resource planning tools, finance systems, and SAP applications. 

The company turned to Kagool—a member of the Microsoft Partner Network with Gold competencies—for help moving data from SAP systems to Azure Data Lake Storage with the partner’s product Velocity. “Kagool helped with the SAP ingestion and fully understood Azure,” says Minesh Bhudia, Senior Enterprise and Security Architect at Smiths Group. “They pitched ideas, designed, and executed rapidly.”

Smiths Group ingested its data into Azure Data Lake Storage using Velocity and Azure Data Factory. The data was then processed, transformed, and structured into a usable format in Azure Databricks. “We can transform our data for reuse in Azure Databricks,” says Ahmed Adnani, Director of Applications and Analytics at Smiths Group.

Saving reporting time 

From there, the data gets consumed by Microsoft Power BI, which employees use for reporting and analytics. With Power BI, Smiths Group reduced the time it takes to create reports and also eliminated the errors that are inherent in manual reporting. Now, employees can quickly see the data they need and can refocus their time on more strategic tasks. 

“In Power BI, the reporting process is automated and analysts don’t have to spend time creating the report—they can instead focus on analyzing what it means,” says Adnani. “Our accounts payable and accounts receivable analysts just want to know their numbers for the month, and I used to spend five days each month running those reports. Now we have that time back because the information is just available with Power BI.”

Becoming more data driven

Since consolidating data and using Power BI, Smiths Group can count on data that’s both easy to access and accurate. Employees can find the data they need with better overall governance. “By moving to Azure and Power BI, we’re getting better accuracy in our data,” says Bhudia. “Becoming more data driven doesn’t just mean creating reports—it means doing it more consistently every time.” 

Ultimately, becoming more data driven also means that business divisions and leaders have easier access to the insights to make informed, strategic decisions. Concludes Adnani, “With Azure, we now have the capability to rapidly drive value from our data. The actionable insights from the data models we’re creating will help us increase revenue, reduce costs, and minimize risk.” 

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