Case Study: Meijer achieves faster insights and higher profits with Microsoft Power BI

Top supermarket chain gains insight and boosts profitability with Microsoft Power BI

Meijer, a 230‑store Midwestern supercenter chain with 70,000 employees, faced sluggish sales and a fragmented BI landscape that left business users dependent on IT for reports and ad‑hoc analysis. To give store directors and teams timely, self‑service insights, Meijer adopted Microsoft Power BI (alongside Excel and SQL Server Analysis Services) to standardize data sources and democratize reporting.

Microsoft Power BI was connected to an on‑premises SQL Server Analysis Services cube holding about 20 billion rows, delivering sub‑two‑second query performance and enabling store teams to drill into hourly sales and create their own reports. The solution reduced IT reporting bottlenecks, drove a more data‑driven culture (sales flashes are sent every two hours to ~800 leaders), and produced measurable gains—such as a more than 40% profit increase on cookies during Memorial Day—while paving the way to extend Power BI with Office 365 and Azure Machine Learning.

Meijer

Marilyn Richards

Director of Business Intelligence and Collaboration