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About Caplugs
Caplugs, a brand of Protective Industries, is a global manufacturer specializing in product protection, masking, and custom-molded plastic components. With more than 75 years of experience and a catalog of over 50,000 parts, Caplugs serves a wide range of industries including automotive, medical, electronics, and aerospace.
Operating across a global footprint, the company supports a complex, data-rich environment spanning sales, operations, and enterprise analytics. With12 manufacturing and distribution facilities across North America, Europe, and Asia, producing 32 million parts per day, Caplugs' data environment spanned multiple ERP instances, regional Business Central deployments, legacy Navision databases, and a Dynamics CRM system. Despite significant data availability, its analytics landscape lacked consistency, stability, and scalability. Leadership identified the need to modernize the data platform to enable more reliable insights, increase adoption across the business, and support future innovation.
To address this, Caplugs partnered with Quisitive to modernize its data estate and implement Microsoft Fabric as a unified analytics platform.
The Challenge: Broad Data Without Consistent Insight
Over time, Caplugs’ analytics environment had grown fragmented. The organization relied on a large number of SSRS reports and on‑prem Power BI datasets – many of which surfaced the same KPIs with slightly different definitions. This made it difficult to ensure consistency across teams and geographies.
Business users across sales, operations, and other functions also lacked the ability to easily access and analyze data on their own, slowing decision‑making and limiting adoption of analytics across the organization. Compounding these challenges, the existing environment experienced issues with stability and performance, reducing confidence in the data and its availability.
"We are a data-centric, data-heavy company with a very wide breadth of data - but we were experiencing a stretch where our data felt wide but lacked the depth for advanced insight." Rick Weber, Senior Director of Enterprise Data & Analytics, Caplugs
Caplugs needed a partner that could help stabilize the platform, address gaps in data engineering and discovery, and guide the organization through a thoughtful modernization effort.
“The problem wasn't a lack of data - it was a lack of trust in it. Teams across the business were pulling from different reports that showed the same numbers differently, making it hard to have a single, confident view of performance.” Kevin Gormley, Data & Analytics Platform Manager, Caplugs
The Solution: A Modern, Unified Data Platform
Caplugs selected Quisitive to lead its data platform modernization, beginning with stabilizing the existing environment to ensure reliable access to analytics. This foundational work allowed the business to move forward confidently while setting the stage for broader transformation.
From there, Quisitive worked closely with Caplugs to modernize and centralize the data estate in the cloud using Microsoft Fabric.
Key elements of the solution included:
- Consolidating data into a unified platform to support enterprise analytics
- Creating a centralized semantic model to standardize KPIs and reporting
- Improving the reporting and analytics experience in Power BI
- Leveraging new Microsoft Fabric capabilities-such as shortcuts and mirroring-to deliver early value while building for scale
“A key part of the early work was simply stabilizing what already existed. Before any modernization could begin, Quisitive focused on getting Caplugs' existing environment healthy and reliable - giving the business confidence in its data again while the new platform was being built alongside it.” Alex Carvalho, Principal Consultant, Quisitive.
By modernizing the data estate and improving the user experience, Quisitive helped position Caplugs for stronger data adoption across the business.
“We needed a partner who was able to guide us through the difficult processes where we had gaps- from data engineering to discovery and scoping.”
- Rick Weber, Senior Director of Enterprise Data & Analytics, Caplugs
The Results: Scalable, Self‑Service Analytics
With a unified data platform in place, Caplugs can now deliver analytics at a scale that was previously unattainable. Reporting has been standardized across geographies and business domains, bringing consistency to KPIs and creating a shared view of performance.
Business users are now better equipped to explore data directly in Power BI, reducing reliance on IT and accelerating time to insight. Users with strong Excel skills can interface with Power BI to answer questions and extract insights independently, supporting more data‑driven decision‑making across the organization.
The modernized platform has also created a clear path forward for advanced analytics and AI. With a consistent flow of data now established, Caplugs is positioned to take advantage of new Microsoft Fabric features and AI capabilities as they emerge.
A Foundation for Long‑Term Growth
Today, Caplugs’ enterprise insight and analytics team is executing a charter to operationalize data across all business domains and geographies using a unified platform. Microsoft Fabric now serves as a scalable foundation that can grow alongside the business and evolve to meet changing needs.
Quisitive continues to act as a trusted partner - supporting day‑to‑day operations, addressing new challenges as they arise, and helping Caplugs build and expand its analytics capabilities over time.
"Before working with Quisitive, we had a sea of paginated reports and on-prem data with no consistency. Now we have a unified platform that lets us scale our analytics and unlock reporting at levels the business has never seen before."
- Rick Weber, Caplugs
What's Next?
The move to Microsoft Fabric wasn't just about fixing today's reporting problems - it was about being ready for what comes next. With a clean, consistent flow of data now established, Caplugs has a clear path toward more advanced capabilities: automated insights, predictive analytics, and eventually AI embedded directly into how the business makes decisions.
That progression is already underway. The team is working through a deliberate roadmap, using 2026 to solidify the foundation, 2027 to begin activating on AI, and 2028 to scale those capabilities across the business.
"Now that we have a consistent flow of data, we're not just recreating what we had before - we're going to be able to unlock the AI capabilities and new features that come with Fabric. That was always the goal."
- Kevin Gormley, Data & Analytics Platform Manager, Caplugs
