FMCG & Retail

Send notifications to Stakeholders about Sales and Inventory of Product reaching a Particular Threshold.

There is an FMCG company having a Nationwide presence that supply FMCG products which are usually not long-lasting products and regarded as CPG (Packaged Goods for Consumers). So, to minimize the wastage and maximize the sales it is very crucial to monitor sales and inventory and take necessary action. All this business is managed Using Dynamics 365 CRM and data is Stored in its unified storage location Dataverse. Using this Data, company wants to develop a Power BI Report which helps them to have a bird eye’s view of their business and track the Sales and Inventory of their products in various stores and notify the manager concerned on crossing a prescribed threshold.

The Challenge

What Was Holding the Business Back?

Managing inventory across a nationwide retail network required continuous monitoring of stock levels and sales performance. Without automated notifications, identifying stock shortages or slow-moving products depended on manual reporting, resulting in delayed business actions.

Inventory Risks Low stock levels and slow-moving products were difficult to identify before they impacted sales or increased wastage.

Manual Monitoring Sales and inventory performance required constant manual review across multiple stores and products.

Delayed Alerts Managers lacked proactive notifications when inventory or sales crossed critical business thresholds.

Fragmented Analytics Business data required transformation and centralization before meaningful reporting and monitoring could be achieved.

Objective

What We Set Out to Achieve

Build a Microsoft Fabric-based analytics platform that centralizes sales and inventory data, delivers interactive Power BI dashboards, and automatically notifies stakeholders whenever predefined inventory or sales thresholds are reached.

Our Approach & Solution

How We Delivered Results

Designed an end-to-end Microsoft Fabric solution that extracts, transforms, stores, visualizes, and continuously monitors business data to trigger automated alerts for critical inventory and sales events.

Data Preparation

Extracted and transformed Dynamics 365 Dataverse data using Dataflow Gen2 to prepare analytics-ready datasets.

Centralized Storage

Loaded transformed business data into Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse, creating a unified source for reporting and monitoring.

Business Dashboards

Developed interactive Power BI dashboards providing complete visibility into sales trends, inventory levels, and store performance.

Smart Alerts

Configured Microsoft Fabric Data Activator to automatically send email and Microsoft Teams notifications when business thresholds were exceeded.

Threshold Monitoring

Automatically detected low inventory, slow-moving products, and predefined sales conditions without manual intervention.

Real-Time Notifications

Delivered instant alerts through email and Microsoft Teams to ensure rapid response from business managers.

Unified Architecture

Leveraged Microsoft Fabric's integrated ecosystem to eliminate the need for separate automation and storage platforms.

Scalable Analytics

Built a centralized solution capable of supporting additional stores, products, and monitoring rules as business requirements evolved.

Results & Impact

The Outcome

The Microsoft Fabric solution automated inventory monitoring and stakeholder notifications, enabling faster responses to stock issues, improving operational efficiency, and reducing dependency on manual reporting.

Alert

Smart Notifications

Stock Threshold

Teams

Instant Response

Live

Inventory Watch

Conclusion

The Bigger Picture

The Intelligent Sales & Inventory Threshold Alert solution transformed traditional inventory monitoring into a proactive, event-driven process using Microsoft Fabric. By combining Dataflow Gen2, Lakehouse, Power BI, and Data Activator, the organization gained real-time operational visibility, automated stakeholder notifications, and a scalable analytics platform that minimized stock risks, reduced wastage, and improved decision-making across its nationwide retail network.

Additional Details

To make a Power BI report first-hand what we require is cleaned and well transformed data. To perform this Microsoft provides end to end solution as mentioned below.

In general, the Data Analytics project has three steps in common. Extract, Transform, and Load.

For Extracting and Transforming data MS Fabric provides its all new and Powerful component DataFlow Gen2 consisting of more than 100 connectors.

After connecting to the data source, we will transform it according to the business requirement using Data Factory’s component DataFlow Gen2.

Data Pipeline for Migrating the Data

Transforming Data using DataFlow Gen2

Now we must store our data somewhere to access it for making Power BI Report. For this MS Fabric has Lakehouse in its feature.

Dataflow Gen 2 has the option to select the destination where we want to dump the transformed data. Using this, we dump the data into the Lakehouse.

Stored Transformed Data in Lakehouse

Now we have the data as per our requirement from which we will create a Power BI report.

Power BI Report

Having our Power BI report ready with visuals and calculations displaying crucial information for business.

Now comes the final step of notifying the person concerned about the inventory status of the related store and sales generated in the past weeks. MS Fabric has its game-changing component for this as well, the Data Activator. Using Data Activator, we set an Action of Emailing and Sending Teams message triggered by threshold set by us. For example, if the inventory of any product is below 3 units, then the Manager should get the message making him aware of the situation or if there are some products which have not been sold in past week than also the Manager should be informed.

Configuring Reflex in Data Activator to send Alerts

Using all these components of Fabric our Architecture looks like below.

Project Snapshot

Client Type Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) Enterprise

Tools Used Power BI · Data Engineering · Microsoft fabric · Dynamics 365

Focus Area Sales, Inventory Monitoring & Intelligent Alerts

Deliverable Real-Time Sales & Inventory Monitoring Dashboard with Automated Alerts