Retail analytics empowers charming charlie users
By Retail Technology | Wednesday October 2 2013
Award-winning US speciality retailer users analytics to provide business users merchandise and performance insights across its retail enterprise
Fashion accessories retailer Charming charlie has selected Manthan’s business intelligence (BI) and retail analytics application to support a 'single version of the truth' across multiple business units, including merchandising, store operations, planning and finance.
Prior to installing Manthan’s retail intelligence software, ARC Merchandise Analytics, charming charlie depended on spreadsheets to combine disparate systems data for reporting purposes. This process required the availability of technical resources to perform labour-intensive data manipulation to deliver retail reporting. As a result, charming charlie’s IT team was performing data dumps to support numerous reports required across the business and consequently, reports did not reflect real-time data.
“We knew that it was time to adopt a solution to tie our various applications together in order to drive better business insights,” said Jay Nayak, senior director of IT applications at charming charlie. “Our team was looking for an analytics package that was quick to implement and offered our stakeholders the ability to access a single version of the truth anytime and anywhere.”
Transforming business reporting
The ARC Merchandise Analytics system has a hardened retail data model designed to ensure standardisation and consistency across business reporting. This retail data model, combined with pre-built key performance indicators (KPIs) and dashboards, reduces implementation timeframes compared to traditional business intelligence packages. The provider said a typical ARC implementation includes the delivery of pre-built dynamic reports and measures across merchandising, assortment planning, buying and replenishment, store operations and more.
“With Manthan’s solution, members of our merchandising and operations teams can build their own dashboards and reporting views specific to their requirements without placing an IT request,” added Nayak. “Individuals can slice and dice data, perform rollups and drill-downs, filter by attributes and interact with views to drive down to real-time insights on the fly. It’s not a mere improvement to our previous reporting processes, it’s a complete transformation in how to we analyse data.”
