Cary Group is one of Sweden's largest companies within vehicle glass and auto body repair. The company operates in three primary service areas: vehicle glass, bus glass, and minor body and paint repairs. The company also has operations in Denmark, Norway, the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, and Belgium.
The challenge
Cary Group’s business strategy is based on growth through acquisitions – often acquiring family-owned businesses that have existed for decades. This approach brings certain technical challenges.
“Our acquisition strategy means that we frequently need to handle IT platforms in need of modernization. More often than not, the necessary IT investments have simply not been made. Therefore, we need to establish various structures around this, which requires a lot of work,” says Annika Hansson, CIO at Cary Group.
Cary Group has grown rapidly in recent years, and with many different systems and databases, obtaining a unified overview becomes challenging. The company thus needed a central data platform that could make data accessible and efficiently analyzable. Additionally, the company works under the motto "One Company," aiming to create a unified corporate culture despite local business models. This has placed high demands on collaboration models and efficient file handling, so that teams can easily collaborate and scale systems in a uniform way.
The company's vision is to create a data-driven culture where all decisions are based on data, making it easy for everyone – from vehicle glass technicians to management – to make data-driven decisions. A significant challenge in this has been managing the different IT environments that come with each acquisition.
“Our biggest challenges when it comes to working data-driven originate from our foundation as a family business, as we have different prerequisites both IT-wise and operationally. Previously, the focus was very much on keeping the business running, ensuring jobs came into the workshops, etc. But there hasn’t been the same strategic drive that we are now trying to introduce,” says Daniel Niemi, Enterprise Architect at Cary Group.
The solution
Aided by Random Forest, Cary Group decided to implement Microsoft's new Cross-Tenant function – which enabled smooth operation between units without needing to gather everything in a common environment. With the Cross-Tenant function, new markets can get started quickly and access reports and analyses.
“From our part, the project began by taking over an existing solution that was not built to grow as Cary Group did, but rather designed for a smaller operation. So, we made the solution more scalable and ensured it could handle new incoming demands from the business,” says Mikael Karlsson, BI consultant at Random Forest.
The company’s booking system is at the heart of the business model, and the new system can handle the entire flow from booking to invoicing. These types of strong integrations are particularly important when, like Cary Group, you have insurance companies as major clients.
To centralize the right areas, Cary Group also chose a data mesh architecture, where they can create central datasets that are then used locally.
Business benefits
The Cross-Tenant functionality has provided Cary Group with several benefits, both operational and IT-related.
“Our collaboration with Random Forest has resulted in many improvements. By generalizing our existing platform and integrating and harmonizing our subsidiaries’ data, we can now report in a unified way across our countries. We also see that we can achieve significant impacts through operational improvements, such as enabling workshops to work more efficiently. Additionally, the group function allows us to get a unified view of the state of our markets. We gain data visibility, which helps us make comparisons,” says Niemi.
Cary Group has also initiated the next step in its data journey by starting to migrate large parts of the solution to Microsoft Fabric.
“We chose Fabric because we want to quickly get started in new markets that may have never worked with BI before, markets that may lack cloud resources or the ability to set up data warehouses themselves. After all, our goal is to build a common analytics platform so that the entire company can easily access data, and here we see Fabric as the future,” concludes Niemi.
Customer case summary (2 min)
Customer case and presentation from the Data Day 2024 (30 min)