How SKOPE improved data reliability with Microsoft Fabric

Building on a strong data foundation

SKOPE is a New Zealand-founded, family-owned manufacturer of commercial refrigeration, supporting customers across New Zealand, Australia, Europe and the Pacific. With more than 300 staff globally, the business has built a strong reputation for innovation, reliability and high-performance refrigeration solutions across both foodservice and commercial fleet environments. 

That forward thinking mindset extends well beyond SKOPE’s products. Across the business, digital capability, enterprise systems and business intelligence reporting play a significant role in supporting operational performance, customer service and decision making. 

There’s a strong culture of continuous improvement and digital investment. Technology, reporting and data are deeply embedded in how teams operate across the organisation.” 

For many manufacturing businesses, digital transformation still means tackling fragmented systems, disconnected data and manual reporting processes. SKOPE was already beyond that point. 

Rather than solving foundational visibility challenges, the business was focused on developing their existing reporting and data environment to improve reliability, support future scale and create stronger foundations for ongoing innovation. 

Restoring confidence and reducing friction

Fusion5 worked closely with the SKOPE team to assess the existing environment, identify migration risks and redesign elements of the data architecture to improve stability and scalability. 

That included simplifying ingestion logic, refining data joins and developing migration assessment and solution design artefacts to support the transition to Microsoft Fabric. 

The first phase of work focused on migrating core JD Edwards data and reporting workloads into Fabric before progressively transitioning reporting environments and retiring older Synapse pipelines. 

For the business, the impact was about more than platform modernisation. Improving reliability and restoring confidence in reporting environments had become increasingly important as data and reporting became more deeply embedded in day-to-day operations and decision making across the organisation. 

The business has experienced a huge uplift in both the platform reliability and confidence in the BI reporting suite that teams depend so heavily on."

By early 2026, SKOPE had fully transitioned its reporting environment to Fabric and decommissioned the original Synapse workloads. 

Since then, the SKOPE team has continued expanding the platform’s use, bringing additional data sources into Fabric and progressing a backlog of new reporting and analytics initiatives. 

As the team’s knowledge and confidence with the Fabric platform has grown, SKOPE has taken greater ownership of the ongoing development and expansion of the environment. 

We’ve done the remainder of the migration work ourselves. We’re up and running with Fabric.” 

Creating the capability and platform for innovation and AI 

As agentic AI continues to evolve rapidly, the importance of trusted and accessible enterprise data has become increasingly clear. 

We’re really seeing the value of having well organised and structured data. The opportunity to leverage Fabric Data Agents built into the platform is an exciting next step on our data journey.” 

The business is now integrating a growing range of operational and IoT data sources into Fabric, including servicing systems and data collected through connected refrigeration assets and mobile applications. 

That capability is creating new opportunities for operational insights, service optimisation and future innovation across the business. 

Building internal capability has also been an important part of the partnership with Fusion5. 

Originally, SKOPE expected future phases of migration work to be led externally. Instead, through hands-on immersion in the platform, combined with ongoing AI enablement and Fabric Data Agent training, the internal team has increasingly taken ownership of the environment. 

Learning as you’re doing is much easier and more valuable than watching someone else do it."

Fusion5 continues to support the team through advisory services, data governance discussions, training and strategic guidance as new features and opportunities emerge. 

They’ve got deep knowledge of the technology. Sometimes it’s about validating the direction we’re heading before we do it.” 

From support function to strategic partner

As confidence in reporting and the underlying platform has improved, the role and impact of data across the business has continued to grow. 

With more reliable and accessible insights flowing into more areas of the organisation, teams are increasingly able to ask different questions, target innovation and operational improvement opportunities, and make more strategic and informed decisions. 

I’ve certainly experienced a shift from more foundational work to more strategic work. The digital team has time to show up differently in the business now.” 

SKOPE has built its reputation through continual innovation, and with data increasingly shaping customer experience, operational performance and decision making, it’s ready to keep leading through the next wave of AI-influenced transformation.