Data turnaround reduced from 40 minutes to under 60 seconds
Consolidated multiple legacy BI systems to one source of truth
Shifted 80% of data team velocity to backend engineering
Standardized real-time operational metrics for 6,000 staff
Managed cloud compute costs using strict query governance
Power International consolidated five disparate BI systems into Looker and BigQuery, delivering trusted insights to 6,000 employees.
Power International consolidated five disparate BI systems into Looker and BigQuery, delivering trusted insights to 6,000 employees.
Migrating from brittle legacy BI silos for trusted data
Power International, a leading electronics and kitchen retail giant operating across Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland, faced immense analytical complexity managing over 6,000 employees. Historically, the company suffered from extreme business intelligence fragmentation, running reports across five or six separate reporting systems, including QlikSense, and PowerBI. Because metric definitions were siloed within each reporting engine, executive and operational teams frequently generated multiple conflicting measurements for identical business calculations. Engineering teams wasted hours debugging underlying SQL logic to reconcile numbers before strategic decisions could even be discussed.
To improve from this brittle architecture, Power restructured its data platform and launched a comprehensive migration to Google Cloud. They replicated core transactional data from SAP alongside external SQL servers, APIs, and SFTP inputs straight into BigQuery staging environments. Inside BigQuery, raw tables undergo a robust three-layer cleaning and transformation architecture orchestrated by Google Cloud Workflows, Cloud Run, and native Dataform data modeling workflows.
The final transformation layer untangles highly normalized SAP data into optimized reporting tables tailored as inputs for Looker, systematically sunsetting the legacy BI systems. Instead of an unstable lift and shift, they executed a strategic department-by-department migration, prioritizing heavy store user bases before transitioning complex corporate reports. Because the underlying data transformation pipelines were centralized inside BigQuery and Dataform first, mapping the semantic models into Looker was incredibly fast, giving the entire enterprise a single, highly performant source of truth.
To help with the consolidating of BI tools s360 was brought on. “s360 partnered with us to accelerate the consolidation of multiple BI platforms into a single governed analytics environment in Looker, enabling us to move faster while maintaining focus on scalability, governance, and long-term platform strategy,” says Agata Woźnia-Kwaśniewska.
Before Looker and the Google Cloud stack, we ran five or six different reporting tools, leading to multiple conflicting metrics. Consolidating our data pipelines into BigQuery gave us a single, automated source of truth that completely eliminated data distrust and manual maintenance pipelines.
Agata Woźniak-Kwaśniewska
Head of Data and Analytics, Power International
Balancing security and analytics with role-based optimization
Deploying enterprise analytics to 6,000 retail workers with diverse technical backgrounds created a steep user-adoption challenge. Power initially opened up full, unrestricted ad-hoc data exploration access to store and department managers. However, early platform metrics revealed that staff members were spending valuable operational time adjusting fine visualization details inside dashboards, rather than focusing on their primary business task, selling goods to retail clients.
The true magic of the Looker semantic layer is the ability to maintain absolute metric consistency across multiple security tiers. Whether a frontline salesperson or a corporate executive queries a metric, they are guaranteed to see the exact same numbers, backed by automated data governance.
Agata Woźniak-Kwaśniewska
Head of Data and Analytics, Power International
To optimize productivity and strictly curb runaway cloud query costs, Power implemented a highly sophisticated, three-tiered role-based access control (RBAC) architecture within Looker. Headquarter teams retain comprehensive model exploration and custom dashboard creation rights. Store and department managers utilize curated, pre-governed explorers tailored strictly to essential store operations, while frontline sales staff interact exclusively with predefined metrics tracking individual and local store performance. This framework guarantees that everyone views identical underlying data while keeping compute interactions streamlined and business focused.
Additionally, Power shifted from generic documentation to highly targeted, use-case-specific business training. They built a centralized training hub based directly on their own production data schemas and dashboards.
This tailored enablement helped staff quickly adapt, allowing them to utilize advanced platform features like automated Monday morning dashboard caching by email and secure vendor report scheduling using SFTP. Employees can now seamlessly stick to optimized filters first before safely moving over to automated threshold alerts, ensuring absolute platform stability and strict query cost governance.
Shifting corporate culture from basic analytics to strategic insights
Unifying the data architecture under Looker and BigQuery triggered a deep cultural shift across Power's regional operations. Powered by governed self-service explorers, business units evolved from passive consumers of static reports into proactive analysts capable of generating custom measures and dimensions to identify fresh corporate KPIs. Instead of simply tracking flat sales revenue, marketing and supply chain teams now actively trace the underlying downstream impacts of specific email, SMS, and targeted ad campaigns. Staff members can easily connect the dots to understand what variables influenced the numbers, making the entire workforce insight-driven rather than just number-focused.
This self-service model successfully rebalanced the central data and analytics team's workload. Rather than spending 80% of their velocity building manual dashboard wireframes for individual business requests, the engineering team has stepped back to focus entirely on backend optimization, semantic model scaling, and running active proof-of-concepts on conversational analytics with Anthropic’s Claude. By automating report generation through Looker's LookML layer, the team is now perfectly positioned to scale. They have shifted their engineering focus to high-value architectural efficiency, platform performance, and security. This ensures the semantic layer serves as a robust, financially sound launchpad for future conversational AI integrations, allowing the data team to implement query quotas and bytes-billed controls while keeping production data fast, reliable, and secure across their entire retail footprint.
By automating report building through Looker, we freed our core analytics team from constant dashboard requests. We have shifted our focus to high-value backend optimization, while our business teams have evolved from simply viewing past revenue to actively discovering new operational insights.
Agata Woźniak-Kwaśniewska
Head of Data and Analytics, Power International
Power is a major Nordic electronics and kitchen retail company operating extensive digital and physical store networks across Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland.
Industry: Retail
Location: Norway
About Google Cloud partner — s360
s360 is a marketing technology partner founded in 2011, with a team of more than 330 digital specialists working together on the same mission: to help brands and retailers grow.
