Citta Design and ZAP Data Hub

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Background

Citta Design, an innovative New Zealand furniture and design company has been operating for 25 years, designing, manufacturing and selling high-end furniture, textiles and homeware. With a design team of six, Citta releases two seasonal collections each year inspired by a country or a city. The current collection was inspired by 1970s Berlin.

In 2012, Citta Design wanted more control to shape its brand story and made the bold decision to move into direct retail by opening a series of stores. While 50% of its market share remains wholesale, the increased focus on retail sees the company with 12 stores, including stores in Auckland and Sydney, with ambitions for a much bigger presence in Sydney, Melbourne and elsewhere.

Citta also has an online retail presence which is growing exponentially.

Challenges

Citta Design, realizing the importance of performance and transaction speed in a retail environment, wanted to migrate from Dynamics AX 2012 R2 to Dynamics AX 7 in Azure. In doing this migration, they needed a means to provide historical reporting and a centralized, governed, data hub for the business without migrating all of the transactional detail into the new Dynamics AX 7 in Azure instance. They also wanted to eliminate the need to maintain two separate instances of Dynamics AX on two different hosted/cloud-based environments.

In moving to Dynamics AX 7 in Azure, Citta Design needed the ability to archive and merge fact tables across both versions with a partner who had deep Dynamics AX expertise. In addition to their Enterprise reporting tool and Microsoft’s Power BI for their self-service reporting, they needed to ensure that there would be no loss of access to their data, as well as maintain the ability to connect and pull the information they need from Azure.

The business required a way to maintain a single source of the truth as well as allow for additional data to be added while providing their users a seamless transition to the new Dynamics AX 7 in Azure.

Solution

Citta chose ZAP Data Hub to assist with the migration as well as manage their data assets into the future. ZAP Data Hub combines data automation and data modeling — all supporting governed and trusted data outputs from a central point in the business.

“Citta Design is leveraging ZAP Data Hub to connect not only to our existing AX2012 R2 instance, but also provide the data hub associated with our upcoming go-live on Dynamics AX7 in Azure. Using ZAP Data Hub, we are able to integrate our two Dynamics AX instances and provide the ability to deliver seamless, governed self-service BI through Microsoft Power BI in Azure Cloud. Working with the ZAP team, we were able to accomplish this initial integration in less than two-weeks of actual time spent and are already seeing the value of the ZAP solution for AX7,” — Mysun Mathew, BI & Applications Manager, Citta Design/ Acland Holdings

Benefits

• Reduced need to maintain a hosted version of Dynamics AX and Dynamics AX 7 in Azure to allow for historical reporting.
• Empowers the end-users to leverage governed reports through ZAP Data Hub and self-service BI through Power BI.
• Reduced the underlying cost of the Dynamics AX rollout by reducing the data migration requirements.
• Ensured a scalable path forward to provide the business with access to governed data and the ability to add new datasources as the need arises.