Case Study: Marks & Spencer achieves faster, democratized insights with Microsoft Power BI

Marks & Spencer speeds up insights with Azure Synapse Analytics

Marks & Spencer, a leading British retailer, faced an aging on‑premises data platform that couldn’t keep up with massive, peaky retail workloads or deliver fast self‑service analytics. To modernize, M&S moved to a Microsoft Azure‑based architecture—using Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Databricks, and Azure Synapse Analytics—and feeds visualizations and dashboards into Microsoft Power BI.

The Microsoft solution centralized storage in ADLS, used Databricks for transformation and Azure Synapse for analytics so teams can self‑serve insights and push dashboards into Microsoft Power BI. The new platform reduced reliance on IT for reporting, enabled rapid, cost‑efficient scaling of compute (spinning clusters up and down as needed), and democratized data access—allowing retail and support teams to reshape stock and loss reporting and generate more incremental business value.

Marks & Spencer

James Ferguson

Product Manager