McDonald’s New Zealand operates more than 170 restaurants nationwide, serving over one million customers each week. Most are owned and operated by local franchisees, supported by a national team focused on a consistent customer experience, strong operational performance and food quality. At that scale, dependable sales reporting helps the business understand how the restaurant network is performing and respond with confidence.

The reporting environment had not kept pace with the information McDonald’s needed. Sales and customer engagement data sat in separate sources, while legacy SQL Server dependencies limited the scale and resilience of the platform. One of those sources was Plexure, the customer engagement platform supplying data used in reporting. Daily sales updates were not always available when reporting users needed them, making it harder to build a timely view of performance across more than 170 restaurants. 

Moving to a modern platform would address those constraints, but it also introduced a risk the business could not ignore. Historical sales information had to remain intact, data from Plexure’s new connector had to be checked against the existing Bulk Data Extract, and the Power BI reports already in use could not lose detail or accuracy. If that continuity was lost, a more efficient platform could still leave people questioning the numbers.

“McDonalds NZ needed to move off legacy SQL Server dependencies onto a modern Databricks environment, so they could bring in Plexure’s new data connector and get a more scalable, resilient foundation for their sales reporting.”

Those risks meant the migration had to be judged by more than a successful technical cutover. Plexure and daily sales data needed to come together on a shared platform, with a reliable flow that kept information current and preserved its history. The technology beneath the reports could change, but the people using them still needed the same detail and accuracy.

To bring the data together, Adaptiv built an Azure Databricks environment that brought Plexure customer engagement data and Daily Sales Summary information into one place. This created a direct path from both sources to the Power BI reports used to understand restaurant performance.

Plexure data arrives through Delta Sharing, while an Azure Logic App moves Daily Sales Summary files from SharePoint through Azure Blob Storage and into Databricks. Automating both paths keeps new information moving into reporting consistently. 

Once the data arrives, a Bronze, Silver and Gold medallion architecture provides a controlled path through the platform. Bronze retains the incoming data, Silver applies validation and transformation, and Gold prepares trusted datasets for Power BI. The separate stages make problems easier to trace, while data-quality rules and quarantine handling stop questionable records from reaching reports before they have been checked. Incremental processing and historical tracking preserve the changes needed for analysis over time. 

Before the new environment could take over, McDonald’s needed evidence that the information still matched. The Plexure feed was therefore validated against the existing Bulk Data Extract, and historical data was migrated into the new platform. That work allowed Power BI reporting to continue without a gap and gave the business confidence in the numbers from the outset. 

With the migration complete, the operating cost of the data platform has fallen by 97%. Current and historical information now sit in one governed environment, giving McDonald’s a simpler platform to manage and a dependable base for its sales reporting. 

“The outcome I’m most proud of is that the Gold layer fully supports the existing Power BI reporting with zero loss of fidelity. We validated it against the source data and documented it properly, so the handover was clean and the client could trust the numbers from day one.”

McDonald’s has lowered the cost of its reporting platform while strengthening the data beneath it. The architecture provides a consistent way to incorporate additional sources and reporting requirements as the business’s needs change.