With Microsoft Fabric, Gay Lea Foods cuts reporting time from 24 days to under a day

Positioned in the geographical and figurative heart of Canada’s agricultural landscape, Gay Lea Foods stands as a testament to the enduring power of co-operative values. With a board largely made up of dairy farmers, the co-op operates with the kind of long-range mindset farmers live by. That ethos—of stewardship, resilience, and generational thinking—has shaped Gay Lea’s approach to quality, innovation, and community for decades. It also earned the co-operative its reputation for fresh, quality products that people trust.

But as the consumer goods industry has evolved, so too have the challenges. These include expanding into new markets through acquisitions, navigating shifting consumer preferences like a sudden spike in demand for cottage cheese, and managing a complex supply chain that stretches from 1,200 member farms to thousands of retail locations across the country. The changing dynamics called for new strategies and tools.

Hampered by data fragmentation

Despite its strong values and market presence, Gay Lea Foods found itself at a crossroads. Years of growth through acquisitions had left the company with a patchwork of longstanding systems and siloed data. “We had fragmented datasets across Dynamics 365, and our reports were largely Excel-based, so there were often inconsistencies in financial numbers across the business,” recalls Palak Verma, Senior Manager of Financial Planning and Analysis at Gay Lea Foods.

The consequences of this fragmentation were real and growing. “There were some datasets that, while they were available, were not an option to access just because of the size,” explains Sam Vassel, Director of Data and Artificial Intelligence Enablement at Gay Lea Foods.

Since Gay Lea Foods is a leading producer of dairy products, the majority of its purchases are raw milk. Each of the co-operative’s 11 plants receives four to ten loads of milk a day, with every one of those milk receipts coming in on a purchase order. While that might not sound overwhelming day to day, the volume of PO data grows exponentially. And although people had access to that data in the system, pulling clean data for reporting purposes was very difficult.

Likewise, Gay Lea Foods’s view into sales and profitability was severely limited, which meant the business could only get reporting on those critical figures 25 days after month-end.

Digging deeper into the data, Prin Sivalingam, CFO at Gay Lea Foods, found that the disconnects extended to key calculations, like gross profit, across departments.

“One group would say, ‘It’s my sale price plus my manufacturing cost,’ while another group would say, ‘It’s my sale price plus my manufacturing cost, plus my transportation cost,’ so the same product might appear to have a different profit margin based on which department was doing the calculation,” notes Sivalingam.

A decision to transform

Recognizing the need for change, Gay Lea Foods began searching for a solution that could unify its data and unlock critical business insights.

“We were already a Microsoft shop, using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain, with a pretty lean IT team,” says Sivalingam. “I was meeting with Microsoft when they walked me through Microsoft Fabric, and instantly I felt this could be the backbone to support everything we’re missing.”

Around that time, Vassel had been doing his best to use what data he could for business insights, but found there were major impediments to his success. “I was building my talent on the Power BI side,” Vassel explains, “but 90% of my time was spent digging into the system, looking for datasets that I could actually leverage, and trying to merge things together to build the datasets I needed for my reports. But a lot of the time, it just wasn’t possible.”

Learning about Fabric and how it might remove those challenges, Vassel researched further and eventually raised the subject with Sivalingam, at which point he learned a Fabric implementation was imminent. Shortly thereafter, his familiarity and general interest in data and AI—and the Fabric implementation, specifically—led to Vassel moving from his role as Director of Supply Chain Planning to an entirely new role at Gay Lea Foods: Director of Data and Artificial Intelligence Enablement.

Moving to Fabric

The adoption of Microsoft Fabric was driven by the need for a scalable, integrated solution that could democratize data access and lay the groundwork for future AI capabilities. But for Gay Lea Foods, the ease with which Fabric delivers data integration, engineering, warehousing, science, real-time analytics, and business intelligence under a single architecture has been a game changer.

Very quickly, Gay Lea Foods experienced a dramatic leap in speed and capability. Datasets that took an hour or more to refresh now refresh in as little as three minutes. This new agility means that data is now used for day-to-day decision making rather than monthly or weekly reporting.

OneLake serves as the single source of truth for data, and Azure AI Document Intelligence provides automated data extraction. The solution is further strengthened by the advanced AI and machine learning capabilities of Azure AI Foundry, plus interoperability with Azure OpenAI in Foundry Models. With these capabilities in place, Gay Lea Foods is moving beyond descriptive analytics to predictive and prescriptive insights. With democratized data, teams spend less time debating the accuracy of numbers and more time making strategic decisions.

Security and compliance, once a headache, became a strength. Previously, data was shared in Excel files across the organization, but with Power BI and Fabric, IT can lock the data down in a highly secure environment with minimal breakpoints.

Driving intelligent automation

The AI transformation at Gay Lea Foods isn’t just about technology—it’s about people.

“With Fabric and Copilot, even if you don’t know Python and you’ve been doing SQL all your life, you’re still able to use the interface and get all the same things done,” says Vassel. “You can just dive in there and use the low-code options.”

Around the company, Vassel sees people popping out of the shadows with talents that no one knew they had. “They caught the bug and went down the rabbit hole because they now have data available to them,” Vassel continues. “They started working with it, learned more, and then dove even deeper into Power Apps.”

As AI and automation become more embedded, Gay Lea Foods expects to see more analyst roles, more automation specialists, and a shift toward a hub-and-spoke model where analytics and innovation happen at every level of the business.

“I think it’s made believers in the organization,” Sivalingam observes. “The concept of using AI beyond chat can seem a little futuristic to people at first. But once folks started to see it and apply it, they can’t get enough.”

Innovation that drives better outcomes

Moving to Fabric quickly allowed Gay Lea Foods to move from hindsight to foresight and oversight—anticipating risks, optimizing supply chain decisions, and surfacing new opportunities for growth.

“It’s not just about speed; it’s about visibility,” Vassel says. “We’re now able to see live milk receipts as they come in. We can actually see the dependencies from one plant to another and how our components split and get made.”

The transformation has been dramatic and measurable. Where once Gay Lea Foods generated monthly sales and profitability reports 25 days after the month closed, people can now call up weekly, daily, and even live snapshots, allowing the company to adapt to market changes in near real time.

“Fabric allows us to understand our cost structure between items by giving us the ability to compare and benchmark rapidly,” says Vassel. “It’s been a real catalyst to identifying the levers we can use to expand the margins of our business.”