Azure and Databricks Data Substrate for Planning

The client is a global manufacturer of professional-grade power tools and accessories, operating as a subsidiary of a larger industrial conglomerate. The parent company reported the client local-currency sales growth of 11.6 percent in 2024 and 7.9 percent in 2025, with margin expansion driven by the client's higher-margin mix. The firm has expanded beyond hardware into a connected-products software-and-data layer: their cloud-based jobsite-management platform (supporting over a hundred connected tools with geofencing, remote lockout, and digital torque reports), embedded ML across their battery platforms, and integrations into Procore and Autodesk BIM 360 that close the loop between the tool layer and project-management software. Taller's engagement at the power tools manufacturer has been continuous since 2021, sourced through a staffing partner, and spans five durable workstreams. The canonical ERP-integration workstream that Volume II covers (Dynamics AX 2012 R2 maintenance, the AX-to-Dynamics-365 migration, AX-to-Oracle ERP/SCM Cloud integration, and the Azure integration platform engineering) is the dominant footprint. Adjacent and growing is the modern data platform on Azure and Databricks, which accelerated through 2024, 2025, and 2026. A small React-on-AWS Serverless team surfaces IoT-tool diagnostic data for the client's internal reliability engineers. The EDI Managed Services lane connects the client to its dealer and distributor network. Taller engineers placed at this client have earned strong client-side reputations - a Taller engineer named "critical to the client" by the client manager in October 2024, another Taller engineer called a "rockstar" by the client manager, a Taller engineer confirmed "reliable, knowledgeable" by the client manager, a Taller engineer called "fantastic" by the Lead Oracle Developer in September 2025.

The power tools manufacturer's adoption of a third-party AI demand-planning SaaS platform produced a +20 percent improvement in forecast accuracy in year one. Atlas is the demand-and-supply planning system that unified the demand and supply data model into a single substrate and drove the organizational redesign combining demand and supply planning into a single role. But the Atlas platform is only as accurate as the upstream enterprise-data substrate it operates against, and getting that substrate right requires sustained engineering capacity across the data warehouse, the data lake, the analytical models, and the BI surface that translates the planning output into business action.

Taller began ramping a modern Azure and Databricks data platform team at the power tools manufacturer in 2024, and the team accelerated through 2025 and 2026 across a multi-discipline pod: Senior and Principal Data Engineering, Data Platform Administration (Terraform / Infrastructure-as-Code / CI/CD), DataOps Support Engineering, and BI / Analytics Engineering (Power BI semantic models on top of Oracle Cloud). The pod has continued to expand through 2026. Scope spans architecting, building, and operating foundational systems of the client's enterprise data platform - Delta Lake-based modernization, metadata-driven design discipline, streaming architectures on Kafka, Event Hubs, Kinesis and Spark Structured Streaming, Unity Catalog governance, Databricks Jobs and Workflows orchestration. The substrate ingests, transforms, and curates data from APIs, databases, files, and event streams across the client's broader operational systems. Taller does not operate the third-party planning platform SaaS platform directly - Atlas is configured and operated by the client's internal planning organization - but Taller operates the data substrate that flows into Atlas via the Oracle ERP / SCM Cloud, Dynamics, and broader operational data surfaces.

Continuous engagement on the modern Azure + Databricks data platform workstream since 2024, with a clear acceleration trajectory through 2025 and into 2026. Taller engineers placed in the data platform have earned recognition: a Taller engineer confirmed "reliable, knowledgeable, taken direction well" by the client manager across multiple feedback cycles in 2024 and 2025. The data engineering substrate that feeds the analytical layer is the operational foundation that lets the third-party planning platform planning improvements (+20 percent forecast accuracy, improved inventory turns, +20 percent revenue growth from new products and promotions) compound across the firm's portfolio expansion strategy.

The dossier's strategic frame on UC4 is the planning function evolving from reactive demand forecasting to confident, capacity-aware action decisions, with Atlas as the lever and agentic planning as the next horizon. Taller's contribution is at the data substrate layer that the analytical layer rests on: the engineering capacity that lets Atlas operate against clean, timely, well-modeled data from the client's broader operational systems. The substrate work compounds with the SaaS investment by ensuring the planning platform has the data quality it needs to produce decisions worth acting on. The data platform workstream is not separately documented in Volume II (Volume II's client case covers the AX-to-Oracle ERP integration discipline); the modern data platform is the actionable next case-study opportunity at the power tools manufacturer.