Dreamfields Transitions Data into Actionable Insights with Microsoft Fabric

Background

Dreamfields, the parent company of the popular cannabis brand Jeeter, began in California as a shared dream between three executives. With headquarters in Desert Hot Springs, CA, the team is constantly looking for ways to expand and improve upon the dream. Dreamfields has teamed with the finest cannabis industry operators, partners, consultants, and professionals. The team drives innovation, efficiency, and growth within the company and the legalized cannabis world.

Dreamfields deployed Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central with SilverLeaf Cannabis ERP to manage its back office and was looking to gather actionable insights from the system.

Velosio recommended that Dreamfields add Microsoft Fabric to its solution, starting with a data repository and analytics for its Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central data.

“The main catalyst for adding Microsoft Fabric to our solution is the need for better analytics,” says Robert Kryscha, national manager of information systems for Dreamfields. “We want to be able to capture all of the data in the company in a comprehensive way, making it easier to report on that data,” continues Kryscha.

Microsoft Fabric

For Dreamfields, Microsoft Fabric encompasses data movement, processing, ingestion, transformation, real-time event routing, and report building. It offers a comprehensive suite of services including Data Engineering, Data Factory, Data Science, Real-Time Analytics, Data Warehouse, and Databases, and gives the Dreamfields team a comprehensive view of data that they didn’t have before.

Microsoft Fabric simplifies Dreamfields’ analytics requirements and integrates separate components into a cohesive stack. Instead of relying on different databases or data warehouses, the Dreamfields team can now centralize data storage with OneLake. The team can transition raw data into actionable insights for business users. “As an example, for our expansion team, the better the data, the better our decision making,” says Kryscha. “If we don’t have very accurate data, it’s really hard to predict the market,” adds Kryscha.

Dreamfields is now working on developing master data management and governance that will dictate how the data is organized within OneLake. “It looks like we’re going to choose Profisee as our MDM tool of choice because it integrates well [with Fabric],” says Kryscha. Profisee makes it easy to connect, manage and govern data across silos — creating certified data for enterprise analytics and decision-making across the data estate. “The eventual goal is to build out a complete data warehouse with data marts for each of the various departments that need reporting or specific data for analytics,” says Kryscha.

Velosio utilized the medallion lakehouse architecture, a recommended design approach for Microsoft Fabric, to locally organize Dreamfields’ data. Medallion architecture comprises three distinct layers, or zones: bronze (raw), silver (validated), and gold (enriched). Each layer indicates the quality of data stored in the lakehouse, with higher levels representing higher quality. This multi-layered approach allows Dreamfields to build a single source of truth for enterprise data products. Importantly, medallion architecture guarantees the Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID) set of properties as data progresses through the layers. Starting with raw data, a series of validations and transformations prepares data that’s optimized for efficient analytics. At Dreamfields, the data is currently at the bronze stage but moving to the silver and then eventually to the gold stage. “There’s already value just in having the data in one place, but we’re not to the point where we’re able to compare the data we had before to the data we have now,” says Kryscha.

The Microsoft Fabric project at Dreamfields was on time and only slightly over budget due to additional requests from the Dreamfields team. “The data team at Velosio did a great job,” says Kryscha. “I think it’s only positive, really. They were communicative. The project manager was very good at keeping us up to date on whether we were running out of time or hours, or if any requests or changes we made would impact the timeline, which of course they’re going to at some level. But the consultant was also very good at telling me exactly what that impact looked like, which was nice,” adds Kryscha

“The project went very well. Projects can take bad turns and can go south quickly. But Velosio did a very good job of making sure that that didn’t happen and actually acted as consultants, which I appreciate,”

– Robert Kryscha, National Manager of Information Systems 

Power BI for the Win

Velosio built several custom Power BI reports on top of Microsoft Fabric to help the Dreamfields team further analyze their data. Power BI allows Dreamfields to connect to data sources, visualize and discover what’s important, and share that with anyone or everyone on the team. “We are using Power BI for everything from fixed assets management and analytics to dashboards for our executives – we are trying to make it the be all end all for our reporting,” says Kryscha. “We are still using Jet reports for accounting analytics, but I do want to try and move away from it as much as possible, because Power BI is faster,” continues Kryscha.

Future Plans

The goal at Dreamfields is to reach a point where everyone is reporting on the same numbers. “We want to make sure that when we report a number, that number is the same for sales, for marketing, for finance or accounting,” says Kryscha. “That’s what the CEO sees, that’s what the salespeople see – that number needs to be the same all the time. And we need to understand exactly what that number means. So, if I tell you that that is net sales, it’s net sales, it’s not net sales plus something or minus something – we’ll have a different field for that,” continues Kryscha.

In the future, Dreamfields has plans to incorporate additional data into the solution by continuing to partner with Velosio. “We’re going to expand the solution, adding our CRM and payroll system, and all of our various potential inputs and places where we need data from are going to live in OneLake moving forward,” says Kryscha. “It’s a solution that can grow with you. So, there will be other pieces that come into it. For us in the cannabis market, it would be great to add data from third party companies like SparkPlug that can get us point of sale data,” concludes Kryscha.