What good is data if no one trusts it?
That was the reality Sally Beauty Holdings faced. With iconic brands like Sally Beauty and CosmoProf, the company generated high volumes of sales and operational data every day from stores, e-commerce, and professional accounts. Even with centralized systems in place, the business struggled to access reliable and consistent insights.
Sally’s data was stored across multiple centralized, but aging, datamarts that weren’t fully aligned or built for the speed, scale, and flexibility required today. This resulted in fragmented data sources and complex models that were difficult for business users to navigate. Without a single source of truth, teams often pulled data from different places or created their own reconciliation processes.
This process inconsistency led to confusion over which data to trust, unreliable definitions of key metrics, delayed or incomplete reporting, and excessive time spent validating data rather than analyzing it. Reporting tools and dashboards often showed conflicting information across departments, undermining confidence and alignment.
Ultimately, the organization needed a cloud-based data foundation to standardize definitions, simplify access, and restore trust across the business.
Sally Beauty needed a partner that understood the realities of retail systems and how to modernize them. They brought in Concord for their deep expertise in managing complex retail data environments, transforming legacy systems, and designing scalable data lake and lakehouse architectures. Concord's experience in data governance, standardization, and driving cross-functional alignment made them a natural fit for the challenge.
Before the transformation could begin, Sally Beauty needed to select the right data platform. Concord played a pivotal advisory role in helping Sally evaluate options across scalability, flexibility, and alignment with their retail data and AI needs. After a thoughtful assessment process, Databricks was clearly the platform best suited to deliver both near-term results and long-term value.
The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform brought together what Sally needed most:
Running on Microsoft Azure, Databricks aligned well with Sally’s existing cloud environment. Concord worked closely with stakeholders across Sally Beauty, Microsoft, and Databricks to drive platform alignment and secure a commercial structure that supported Sally’s long-term goals.
“Databricks was the platform that could scale with our business and unlock the power of our data,” said Rajat Kasera, Director of Data & AI at Sally Beauty. “Its lakehouse architecture gives us a single source of truth that unifies structured and unstructured data, integrates with our Azure environment, and positions us to embrace advanced analytics and AI.”
With the platform in place, Sally was ready to shift focus from wrangling data to using it.
Sally Beauty needed more than a new data platform; they needed a new way to speak the same language across the business.
The first step was to bring business and IT together through collaborative workshops that helped define key data entities and attributes. These sessions were critical to establishing a shared taxonomy so terms like “product,” “vendor,” and “location” had consistent meaning across systems, dashboards, and departments.
In parallel, Concord worked with business stakeholders to define the KPIs and metrics that mattered most. Sales reporting had grown fragmented, with hundreds of legacy reports in circulation. Through structured rationalization and prioritization, we helped trim that down to a focused set of meaningful dashboards designed for decision-making.
With this business alignment in place, we moved into the architecture build. The end-to-end foundation included:
Once the core platform was established, we prioritized ingestion of foundational data domains—Product, Vendor, Customer, Location, and Calendar. These domains were essential to enable consistent dimensional modeling and future cross-functional use cases.
Next, we tackled deeper integration and engineering efforts for key subject areas including Sales, Pricing, and Promotions. Our data engineers used Databricks notebooks to transform complex, disparate datasets—many with decades-old relationships—into clean, analytics-ready star schemas. This untangling created a single, trusted view of sales performance across all brands and channels. What once took weeks to compile is now visible daily in Power BI dashboards, giving teams timely insight into trends, promotions, and pricing impact.
To ensure the data could be trusted and used responsibly, we implemented a comprehensive governance framework. This included:
This combination of business alignment, modern architecture, and strong governance laid the foundation for scalable, AI-ready innovation. Reflecting on the process, Joy Prakash, VP of Solution Delivery at Sally Beauty, emphasized the value of Concord’s partnership:
“Concord proved to be more than a technology partner—they were a true advisor who understood both the complexity of our legacy retail systems and the importance of driving cross-functional alignment. Their ability to bring business and IT together, while modernizing our data foundation, gave us the confidence that this transformation would succeed. The partnership also positioned us for rapid advancement toward implementation of AI and ML offerings, which is a key priority for our long-term growth.”
By May 2025, the joint team completed Phase 1, delivering strong early traction and laying the groundwork for the next stages of Sally Beauty’s modernization journey.
For Scott Lindblom, CIO at Sally Beauty, the value of Phase 1 is clear:
“We now have a trusted daily view of sales performance across all brands and channels. This has not only improved confidence in decision-making but has also freed our teams from time-consuming reconciliation work so they can focus on driving business outcomes. We now have a strong foundation to scale data-driven insights across supply chain, inventory, and marketing.”
The success of Phase 1 has generated strong momentum. With near real-time sales data now available in Databricks, Sally Beauty teams have greater confidence in the data and are using it to inform planning, performance tracking, and decision-making on a consistent basis.
Backed by a modern, scalable architecture and Concord’s integration expertise, the platform is positioned to expand. Future phases will bring in new domains—such as inventory, supply chain, and marketing—broadening the scope of analysis and driving more connected insights across the business.
With Databricks, Sally Beauty is exploring advanced analytics capabilities, including machine learning (ML) and GenAI. Areas of interest include:
This modern data foundation is just the beginning, empowering Sally Beauty to grow smarter, act faster, and uncover richer insights across the enterprise.
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