They asked for reports. They ended up handing us the keys.

It began with a Retail P&L application: Sales, Margin, and cost distribution from store to region to country — including the Sales vs Rent analysis travel retail lives and dies by. It grew into operational intelligence — sales benchmarking, projections, out-of-stock detection. Then it went to the store floor: a mobile Store Coach application replacing paper visits with structured, photo-supported digital evaluations.

The most impactful step was the Order Proposal engine — intelligent stock ordering built on historical sales, rotation patterns, vendor lead times, and stock in transit, with managers retaining override control. It wasn't built against a fixed specification. It was built through 50+ structured validation sessions with category managers, store managers, and procurement — surfacing the constraints and exceptions no document could have captured upfront.

Mid-partnership, the CTO and CFO made a structural decision: no extra communication layer between delivery teams and the business. Empower BI worked directly with the stakeholders who owned the problems, while Lagardère built complementary internal competencies in parallel. Requirement clarity went up, iteration cycles shortened, and precision improved across every initiative.

After a major SAP migration, parts of the data flows were handed to a larger delivery organization. Despite the headcount assigned, pipelines grew unstable, inconsistencies crept in, and timeliness slipped — directly threatening ordering accuracy. Empower BI consolidated the fragmented data ownership and took over the flows end to end: simplified architecture, rebuilt transformations, monitoring, and clear accountability.

"We ended up losing too many nights fixing problems we didn't create and couldn't control. So we took over."

At Lagardère's 30th Anniversary Entrepreneurs Gala, Empower BI was invited on stage. The CEO referenced the ordering improvements. The CTO highlighted the data stabilization. The Head of Operations pointed to the change on the store floor. Recognition came not for dashboards — but for measurable operational impact.