In a bid to improve its store performance and customer marketing, mobile retailer Carphone Warehouse has used business intelligence (BI) software by MicroStrategy as opposed to rival Information Builders because the dashboards created by MicroStrategy were "more professional".
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In an interview with Computing, head of BI development at Carphone Warehouse (CW) Paul Scullion said that the company had a legacy reporting platform that was way past retirement age.
"It was a combination of Business Objects, Crystal Reports and Data Extraction from SAP Source Systems and SQL servers, so not a strict data or BI policy," he said.
He said that although the retailer already had a relationship with MicroStrategy it decided to assess the top five vendors according to analyst reviews and internal knowledge of BI.
"The final two vendors were MicroStrategy and Information Builders and they both put together proof of concepts of dashboards for us, and MicroStrategy won because of the relative ease of deployment of creating new dashboards, an out of box functionality and visualisation widgets where we could just plug our data into it and come up with something that looked very professional," he said.
Scullion said that the other vendors tools required too much of a technical delivery and Carphone Warehouse ran the risk of producing amateur looking dashboards without a high level of technical involvement.
"Carphone planned to use business rather than IT resources to create dashboards and hence needed a tool that did not require a high level of technical development to produce something that looked and worked great," he explained.
He added that speaking to existing MicroStrategy customers convinced him that MicroStrategy could scale to CW's 2,500 branches across Europe.
"We knew that all branch managers would be logging in at 9:30 in the morning on a Monday morning to see the latest figures and we needed to make sure the technology was robust and scalable to cope with that demand," he said.
After signing a contract with MicroStrategy two years ago, CW had to overhaul its infrastructure to ensure it could get the best out of its new business intelligence software. It also migrated much of its data from an Oracle data warehouse to one from Netezza.
"What we're trying to do with the Netezza data warehouse is create a strategic enterprise-wide BI platform. We were in a position where we had hundreds of users with access to create whatever they wanted, so there was no consistency in information presented and conflicts with data use. We're using MicroStrategy to drive a mantra of the single vision of the truth," he said.
The MicroStrategy software has been implemented across 794 UK stores before rollout to CW's operations throughout the rest of Europe.
Further reading
CW's retail dashboard went live in February this year and included most of the main key performance indicators (KPI's) for branch managers to run their estate such as volume, margin, footfall conversion rates, upselling of accessories and insurance.
"In a period of about six months we developed a number of iterations of the retail dashboard so we would demo it to a group of branch managers, get their feedback and redevelop it based on their feedback and present it to them again. We were able to drive really good engagement as they felt they developed the dashboard themselves," Scullion said.
"The feedback for this dashboard has been positive, it means the branch managers have a lot of information in one place as opposed to information in disparate excel spread sheets that were emailed to them or very unintuitive intranet sites; they are finding their team management easier," he added.
CW's customer marketing dashboard went live in April and was created to find what proportion of CW customers could be retained by either upgrading them with the same mobile network or a new network.
Scullion said: "We could monitor this by market, network, and contract length and find out whether we are engaging with our customers well, whether our marketing campaigns are having a desired impact and whether we can change or improve the rate of retained customers."
The marketing dashboard has replaced a number of legacy reporting tools and locally maintained customer databases.
Finally, the supply chain dashboard went into pilot in July and is scheduled to rollout fully in September. It is used to monitor stock levels across the whole organisation, providing information on condition, status and value.
"We're using it to make purchasing decisions as well as stock management and movement decisions," Scullion said.
He added that the firm would now look to introduce tablets and smartphone applications for the dashboards, a dashboard for network relationship reporting, update current dashboards and potentially look into the use of customer relationship management tools.
