Focuses on building market share by exploring the value of transactions

The Channel Islands Co-operative Society (CICS), which operates across 27 stores, with an annual turnover of over £153 million, has increased visibility across its store-wide operations using business intelligence (BI) tools from Manthan Systems as part of a strategy to grow market share. 

Following a period of market growth across new stores and product offerings, CICS found it lacked a unified view of its business data, with information being captured from a diverse number of sources, resulting in a limited business reporting framework, which threatened to impede future growth.

Consolidating with a single data model

Using ARC technology, from BI specialists Manthan Systems, CICS can now capture and track end-to-end transaction data in a single data model, giving management a unified vision of the business across stores and regions, enabling them to capture, analyse and report comprehensive business performance to all stakeholders.

Mike Guest, Channel Islands' Co-operative Society head of IT, commented: “ARC’s advanced analytics capabilities have given much-needed cross functional and store-wide analytical capability to our operations, while maintaining a high level of data consistency and accuracy.

“Besides routine analysis of sales and margin trends for stores, products and categories ARC allows us to create customised reports that are tailor-made for our business enabling us to measure and monitor performance on a daily basis – an ability that we did not have prior to the implementation.”

Process improvement strengthens margins 

Manthan said the ARC framework helps CICS management to measure, monitor and audit, sales, goods receipts and wastage efficiency with a view to improving processes, boosting sales and strengthening margins, as well as providing a powerful interface for all trouble-shooting and query resolution for the business and resulting in quicker turnarounds on customisations.

Over the next 12 months, as the Society looks to continue to grow market share, it will extend the reach of the ARC system to store level and will draw on the system’s strong customer analytics capabilities to provide greater insight on the success of marketing initiatives, including promotion campaigns, advertising and targeted loyalty campaigns.