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  • Rf-Technologies: four years of working together on data-driven growth

  • Rf-Technologies designs innovative solutions to provide their customers with effective passive fire protection products. Its compartmentation and smoke control products ensure the safety of commercial and institutional buildings across Europe: office buildings, hospitals, museums, government buildings and shopping centres. In 2020, they embarked on an ambitious journey to provide full data-driven support for their new ERP system, Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&O, via Power BI. For the latter, they turned to Squadron.
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    • The challenge: from ERP to actionable insights

    • With the implementation of a new ERP system, Rf-t faced a new chapter in their data-driven operation. Their wish? A single streamlined, reliable reporting environment in Power BI. But the raw data from Dynamics was not enough to build meaningful dashboards right away.

      Rf-t chose Jet Data Analytics as the data warehouse technology between Dynamics and Power BI. This tool was already known within their team, and provided enough flexibility to deal with complex business logic. Squadron was engaged to guide and set up the entire process - from data modelling to visualisation.

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      • Our approach: from raw data to data cubes and dashboards

    • Working closely with Rf-t's internal BI team, we developed a modular architecture built around data cubes per domain: Sales, Inventory, Finance, Purchase, etc. Those cubes were fed from a four-layer architecture within Jet, with each layer providing an additional level of data transformation. Think combining tables, calculations, cleansing, filtering and logic implementations.

      This approach ensured that Power BI reports did much more than just visualise: they offered real insights, tailored to the company. Think stock valuations, margin reports and exception handling via smart dashboards.

    • A collaboration that continues to evolve

    • What started as an intensive project with several external partners has grown into a sustainable collaboration. Squadron's active role evolved towards maintenance & optimisation, with flexible support when needed. Among other things, we ensure that nightly data syncs remain running, perform updates in case of data contamination, and guide Rf-t in creating new insights - such as recent margin reporting or in-depth analysis.

      We also collaborated on master data reports to increase the quality of input data - crucial for reliable output. Meanwhile, Rf-T has also built up internal expertise, so together we form a balanced team.

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    • What does the future hold?

    • An important lesson during this project: Power BI is a great tool, but not the right tool for everything. Especially for financial reporting - such as balance sheet and P&L - you run into limits. We therefore recommended additional alternatives such as BrightAnalytics, which may or may not be implemented in the future.

      However, the current solution remains performant and flexible. In addition, Rf-t is also looking ahead: they show interest in moving to a full Azure-based Medallion architecture, with which they want to operate even closer to the Microsoft ecosystem.

      Conclusion: with an approach that combines technical depth with customer proximity, Squadron helped Rf-Technologies achieve a robust, scalable and insightful data platform. For four years now.

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