Fashion giant improves business reporting

Case study: Arcadia sees the benefits of new business intelligence system

Fashion giant Arcadia is moving over to a new set of business intelligence (BI) tools to improve the scalability and flexibility of its business reporting.

The largest independent fashion retailer in the UK - with 150 million fashion items passing through its supply chain every year - Arcadia is known for brands such as Burton, Dorothy Perkins, Miss Selfridge and Topshop.

The company bought Information Builders' Webfocus product in October last year and is in the process of migrating from its current Microstrategy toolset.

Because Microstrategy didn't run on Arcadia's I-series mainframe, the company had the extra cost and inconvenience of running additional Windows servers, according to David Hale, business systems controller at the retail group.

"We decided to go back to the market and look at some other contenders," said Hale.

Matthew Evans, development manager at Arcadia, said as part of the selection process the retailer used Webfocus in two proof-of-concept projects.

One was to create a report, sent out as a weekly email, which gave area managers information on branch sales performance. This was chosen because it was a rewrite of a recently developed Microstrategy application, so the Arcadia team was familiar with the requirements and the documentation was up-to-date.

It was also a small application that used a lot of Microstrategy licences. The second project involved JD Edwards reporting.

"In terms of the proof of concepts both projects were largely successful. We liked it and it was a success - so we bought it," Evans said.

But he warned it was hard to find consultants with the skills necessary to mentor the internal team as they got up to speed on the new technology, and so Arcadia was forced to go as far afield as Sweden and South Africa to find the right people. "Webfocus developer skills are hard to find in the UK and expensive," he said.

As part of the migration process Arcadia also discovered it had more than 1,000 reports on its systems - 500 user-built ad-hoc reports and 500 built by systems, many never used.

"It was a big surprise to us that we had that many - there was a lot of duplication in there," Evans said.

One reason for the huge number of reports was that the different brands in Arcadia group sometime compete in the same market so couldn't be allowed access to each other's data. This meant that the IT group had had to recreate the same report again and again for each brand.

"It was a big plus for Webfocus that we could write one report and restrict the user access to data according to the brand they worked for," he added.

The company decided to migrate the system-built reports that were still in use to Webfocus: "We wanted to validate that we had identified the correct reports to migrate, so we removed all the other reports and waited to see who called the helpdesk and asked where their report was. We ended up getting just two phone calls and that was a good confirmation to us that the analysis had been done well," Evans said.

Arcadia is just about to start work on the user developed queries - and encouraging them to rewrite them into Webfocus by setting a deadline for switching off the old reports.

"It's definitely much more flexible and we don't feel constrained by the product. It's more scaleable; we believe we will have no problem increasing the number of users when needed," Evans added.