Every now and then I speak with vendors' customers to get a different take on solutions being used and what companies really think about products that are marketed with only a positive spin. I also enjoy hearing about the business benefits and value mid-market companies are achieving through their use of BI. As a bonus, I hope to get some insight into any snags or negatives about the product or overall BI project - which customers generally like to share once they start talking. The negatives are a great tool that can be used to provide insights to other companies evaluating solutions in the market place and help them learn from other companies BI initiatives.
In this case, my "victim" of sorts, was Anna's Linens, a retailer focusing on home fashions with over 258 stores across the United States. They are a mid-market company and have been using SAP Business Objects Edge BI for a couple of years. And to my disappointment (even though I'm glad that they are getting a lot of benefit out of their solution), their Crystal use has been nothing but positive - very positive actually!
While transitioning from being a regional to a national retailer, Anna's Linens needed to consolidate information across various locations. Their goal was to find a way to look at marketing, store operations, and merchandising data holistically. Additional considerations included the viability and current install base of a vendor, product ease of use, and the ability to deploy to multiple users within the organization. Once choosing SAP Business Objects Edge BI, the implementation was seamless and several reports were developed with the goal of creating a single view of operational data and moving away from data silos that existed within the organization (specifically in relation to marketing, store operations, and merchandising) . Anna's Linens was able to extract data and create analytics that provided additional insights into sales, customer conversions, and the effectiveness of advertising specific products. In addition, due to the new visibility and centralized view of overall performance, Anna's Linens implemented traffic counters to identify foot traffic and its relation to customer transactions, units per transaction, marketing performance, etc.
Overall, Anna's Linens provides a great example to other mid-market retailers of the advantage of implementing BI. For some reason, retailers have generally remained behind the curve on BI adoption but are slowly beginning to understand the immense value of data. But beyond simply implementing BI, retailers need to understand how data visibility can be tied to continual improvement and how to relate sales data to actual performance. In Anna's Linens' case, they have taken BI to the next level by enabling each department in the company to develop their own metrics - for instance, the measurement of customer service levels - and by creating a cross-functional steering committee to help build and manage BI reports and processes within the organization.
For a mid-sized retailer, Anna's Linens provides a good example of how other companies can take advantage of analytics within their organizations to gain broader insights into performance and to create a cohesive view of operations and customer focused data.
Posted February 5, 2010 9:19 AM
Permalink | No Comments |
