How Northwind Retail cut weekly reporting from 3 days to 20 minutes
A 400-store European retailer replaced six manual spreadsheets with a single live Orbit workspace — freeing their data team to work on forecasting instead of formatting.
Industry
Retail
Company size
2,600 employees
Time to value
9 days
92%
Faster weekly reporting
400+
Stores tracked live
$1.2M
Saved annually
9 days
To full rollout
The challenge
Six spreadsheets, one very tired analyst
Every Monday, a single analyst pulled point-of-sale exports from six regional systems, reconciled currencies by hand, and rebuilt the same set of pivot tables before the leadership stand-up. A single formatting mistake meant a re-run — and sometimes a missed meeting.
Store managers had no way to see their own numbers between reports, so small problems — a slow POS terminal, a stockout — went unnoticed for days.
The solution
One event pipeline, live dashboards for every store
Northwind connected their POS and inventory systems to Orbit's ingestion API in an afternoon. Store-level dashboards were built once using Orbit's saved views, then cloned automatically for all 400+ locations with the correct filters applied.
Store managers now get a live view refreshed every five minutes. Regional directors get a daily digest. Leadership gets the weekly roll-up automatically, with zero manual assembly.
Rollout timeline
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1
Day 1 — Kickoff & data mapping
Orbit's onboarding team mapped POS and inventory fields to Orbit's event schema.
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2
Day 3 — First live dashboard
A pilot dashboard went live for two flagship stores in Amsterdam and Berlin.
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3
Day 6 — Template cloned to all stores
The saved view was cloned across all 400+ locations with store-level filters.
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4
Day 9 — Full rollout & training
Store managers were trained; the manual reporting process was retired for good.
"Orbit didn't just replace our dashboards — it changed how fast we can make decisions. What used to be a Friday-afternoon spreadsheet ritual is now a five-minute check before stand-up."
Priya Nandakumar
VP of Data, Northwind Retail
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