In retail, agility isn’t a buzzword. It’s survival.

Promotions change weekly. Customer expectations move faster than your budget cycle. New brands launch, new stores open, and suddenly you’re trying to match headcount, skills, and costs to a constantly shifting picture on the ground.

For Chalhoub Group—a leading luxury retailer in the Middle East with more than 16,000 employees—that reality eventually ran head‑first into the limits of its HR data. The HR organisation was smart and committed, but trapped in a familiar pattern: siloed systems, slow approvals, and reporting processes that were so manual they left almost no room for thinking.​

They didn’t set out to “do an AI project.” They set out to stop making critical people decisions on partial data and intuition.

Microsoft Fabric ended up being the backbone that made that possible.​

When HR runs on scattered systems and intuition

On the surface, Chalhoub Group is built for agility. The company operates over 750 retail stores, works with more than 450 brands across luxury, beauty, and fashion, and is constantly adapting to new categories like watches, jewellery, and eyewear.​

But behind that customer‑facing agility, the HR reality looked very different.

• Finance and HR data lived in separate systems that didn’t talk to each other.​

• Pulling the basics—headcount, salaries, commissions, store performance—meant hopping between platforms and reconciling numbers by hand.

• During budget and planning intervals, People leaders had just days to put together projections and needed every hour they could get.​

As one HR leader put it, the process was “bogged down by formal approvals and delays,” and even after hours of work, they still had to lean on intuition and informed guessing to decide on staffing, salaries, and commissions.​

In a business where the right people in the right store at the right time directly affects revenue and customer experience, that guesswork carried a real cost.

The moment “good enough” reporting stopped being good enough

The pain was sharpest when it mattered most: budget season.

Reports could take five to six hours to refresh. The HR team would wait, watch progress bars, cross‑check numbers, and then rush insights to decision‑makers under time pressure. The narrow window for planning meant there was little space for “What are we seeing?” and almost none for “What should we change because of this?”​

Leadership wasn’t asking for fancier dashboards. They wanted something more basic and more difficult: a realistic, near real‑time view of the workforce that they could trust.​

That required two big changes:

1. Getting all the relevant data into one place.

2. Giving HR and business teams more autonomy to explore that data without always going back to central IT.

Unifying people data on Fabric

The group was already using Power BI, but the analytics team didn’t have the kind of control, visibility, and governance over data pipelines that they needed. They were still stitching together insights from scattered sources.​

Microsoft Fabric changed that.

Chalhoub’s People Analytics team used Fabric to bring data from various ERP and SaaS platforms into a single environment. Spark transformed data, Data Factory handled ingestion, and everything landed in an overarching lakehouse in OneLake. Direct Lake made it possible to access that data in Power BI without complex refresh gymnastics.​

In practical terms, this meant:

• HR and finance data could finally live side by side.

• Pipelines could be monitored and governed centrally.

• The same underlying data could serve multiple use cases without being rebuilt from scratch each time.

It wasn’t just a tech upgrade. It gave the analytics team confidence that what they were seeing in reports actually reflected reality.

Fixing the quiet failure: “reports are refreshing” (but the data isn’t)

Before Fabric, there was a subtle but serious problem: sometimes Power BI looked like it was refreshing, but it was actually recycling old datasets. No alerts were fired. No one knew refreshes had failed. People made decisions assuming they were looking at the latest information when they weren’t.​

With Fabric Data Pipelines, Chalhoub embedded Outlook notifications at every critical step. When something failed, the right people knew quickly. That avoided semantic models being refreshed with outdated information and protected trust in the numbers.​

This might sound small, but for a people analytics team, it’s foundational. You can’t build a culture of data‑driven decisions if your data might quietly be stale.

From five hours to 30 minutes—and from dependency to autonomy

Once the new Fabric‑based setup was in place, the lived experience for HR and People leaders changed significantly.

Refreshing data reports, which previously took five to six hours, now takes about 30 minutes. That alone turns long days of waiting into a workable rhythm during critical planning windows.​

More importantly, HR teams can now build their own reports and access data in near real time. They’re not stuck in a queue behind IT or analytics. They don’t have to choose between waiting for perfect information and moving ahead on gut feel.​

That autonomy:

• Boosts productivity.

• Reduces high‑pressure, around‑the‑clock efforts in budget season.

• Gives leaders time back to think, not just compile.

As one director put it, Fabric has “significantly enhanced productivity and eliminated high‑pressure efforts during budget seasons.”​

Unexpected leverage: Copilot and new kinds of HR insight

On top of the core Fabric capabilities, Chalhoub also found value in Copilot for Power BI. It wasn’t the headline of the project, but it became a useful co‑pilot for the analytics team: suggesting code improvements and helping end users explore data more naturally.​

Thanks to Spark, the team can now address use cases that were previously out of reach—like adding historical context or creating new calculated features (for example, “time with manager”) without waiting on HRIS or ERP vendors to build expensive new features.​

These might look like technical details, but they accumulate into a different kind of HR function: one that can ask better questions, move faster, and experiment without putting production systems at risk.

HR as an agility engine, not just an administrative function

Zoom out, and Fabric hasn’t just made Chalhoub’s HR analytics faster. It’s changed HR’s role.

With better governance, cleaner pipelines, and near real‑time access to people data, the HR organisation is better positioned to support the company’s agility and growth plans. They can:​

• See staffing and performance patterns sooner.

• Support leaders with data‑backed decisions on salaries, commissions, and scheduling.

• Spend more time on “What should we do?” instead of “Can we even get the numbers in time?”

As one leader put it, “Fabric has not just been a technological upgrade; it has been a transformational tool for our function.” In a sector where agility is a competitive edge, HR now has a data platform built for the pace of retail, not the pace of spreadsheets.​

If this sounds like your world, what’s your next step?

If any part of Chalhoub’s story feels familiar—HR and finance data living in different worlds, reporting cycles that eat whole days, planning decisions made under pressure with partial information—you’re not alone.

Onyx Data works with HR, data, and finance leaders in retail and other industries facing the same challenge: too many systems, not enough trusted insight, and growing pressure to make better people decisions faster.

The work often starts with a clear map of your current people data estate and a simple question: “If we unified this on Fabric, where would it actually change the way we plan, staff, and reward?”

If you’d like to explore what that might look like for your organisation, complete the short form below. Share your role, your current platform landscape, and the one people‑analytics challenge that keeps resurfacing. From there, Onyx will suggest a tailored, no‑obligation starting point you can take back to your team.

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