Desigual:
Worldwide Business Intelligence with BOARD
Optimism, colour and explosive
growth
Desiguals most distinguishing assets are its models:
different, optimistic and colourful. The company
started trading in 1984, accompanied by the slogan
Desigual, it's not the same. In recent years the
company has recorded sustained annual growth of
over 50% and employs a team of more than 3,000
people from 83 different nationalities.
Desigual closed 2010 with a worldwide presence of
200 own-brand stores, 7000 multi-brand clients and
1700 concessions in major department stores, selling
over 15,000,000 garments and reaching a turnover of
440 million euros.
The reasons for choosing BOARD:
rapid development, flexibility and
TCO
The process of selecting a Business Intelligence tool
began in 2005, when the growth forecasts of Desigual
and the increase in management complexity
highlighted the complete ineffectiveness of the
companys legacy transaction reporting system in
coping with growing analytical requirements.
The main requirement was to control sales
performance and carry out timely commercial
analyses on the different existing channels (Retail,
Wholesale and Department Store), with a view to the
growing internationalisation of the firms business
activities.
The process by which BOARD was chosen involved a
proof of concept and comparison with two other
tools: Cognos and MIS Alea on Microsoft cubes.
"The reasons that prompted us to choose BOARD at
the time are exactly the same reasons why we
continue to prefer it over every other tool on the
market: Total cost of ownership, flexibility to change
and a time-to-solution that none of its major
competitors can match. In particular, one of the main
aspects we considered was the ease with which
BOARD could adapt to changes in our business model.
In the immediate future these changes include the
replacement of our ERP system and the opening of
new sales channels, in addition to the expansion of
existing channels. - explained the official source
from Desigual.
Sales Intelligence, Supply Chain
Monitoring and Loyalty Card
Analysis
Desigual began implementing the Business
Intelligence project in its sales area, with the aim of
analysing and monitoring business performance on a
varied channel composed of 200 single-brand stores
(Retail), 1700 department store concessions, 30
franchisees (Franchising) and over 7000 multi-brand
clients (Wholesale), distributed in over 70 countries
on 5 continents.
Using a standard fashion industry data model - based
on item (colour/size), sub-families, families and
BOARD has proven itself ideally suited
to our concrete approach to Business
Intelligence.
This is due to its application flexibility,
which enables us to design and
develop any analysis application
extremely quickly and without the
support of external consultants, as well
as its capacity to provide more expert
business users with a fully self-service
BI environment that allows them to
independently generate dashboards,
reports and ad-hoc queries.
Desigual Official Source
collections - data is analysed with special attention
paid to organic growth, e.g. the evaluation of
increased sales (excluding the contribution made by
the opening of new stores in the case of the retail
channel and by the acquisition of new client stores in
the case of the wholesale channel).
Depending on the channel on which they are carried
out, the organic growth evaluations are on a daily or
monthly basis, whereas for single-brand stores they
also carry out evaluations over much more restricted
time frames. For example, Desigual carries out an
hourly analysis of the footfall-to-sales conversion
ratio, to accurately evaluate the level of service
provided to customers and the performance of sales
staff in each individual store.
The analyses also extend to demand planning and
distribution to sales outlets.
"Although we use TXT to manage replenishment
activity, all monitoring of stock and coverage in stores
is carried out using BOARD. BOARD gives us a precise,
up-to-the-minute overview of the entire logistics flow
at any given time. From materials still to be ordered,
to material on order from the various suppliers, to
material in transit from the hubs and logistics centres,
to material arriving in the stores: everything is kept
under constant control with the aim of anticipating
stock-outs and any other issues along the supply
chain. In this way, we have full visibility at individual
store level; not only of in-stock quantities, but also of
goods arriving and their corresponding delivery
times." commented the official Desigual source.
Another important area of analysis is customer base
segmentation, which is analysed by means of Loyalty
Cards.
"In this area, we adopted a matrix approach, dividing
our customer base according to two dimensions:
average spend and frequency of purchase. From this
four macro-segments were identified (High
frequency, High spend; High frequency, Low spend;
Low frequency, High spend; Low frequency, Low
spend) on which we carry out the classic master data
analyses, regarding age group and sex, correlating
them with the dynamics with which customers move
from one segment to another, become 'sleepers' or
are lost (churn rate).
Throughout this entire series of evaluations BOARD
supports us perfectly, both in terms of the flexibility
and ease with which analyses can be created, and in
terms of performance. This enables us to easily and
rapidly handle data volumes that can reach 62,000
item/size combinations in a single infocube, on over
850 points of sale and for a daily stock sizing of
around 2.5 million records.
Data from the points of sale, from SAP, from TXT and
from custom products for warehouse and order
management is collated and standardised in a single
information base. Thanks to the complete integration
of the product, this enables us to handle reporting,
interactive dashboarding, data analysis, simulations
and ad-hoc queries in a single environment without
having to install, understand and reconcile various
modules.
Furthermore we utilise the broadcasting functions to
send all stores a detailed weekly performance and
sales report incorporating various analysis
perspectives, providing them with targeted and
timely information on which to base their decisions.
Among other things, the actual value of the
information produced is pushing us to invest further
in this area: we have already started a new project to
provide each store with a web connection to access
BOARD data, so as to guarantee instant access to up-
to-the-minute information at any time." explained
the official Desigual source.
The new world of BI & CPM
From the steering committee to
operations: the value of Business
Intelligence for Desigual
"The most positive aspect of the various Business
Intelligence initiatives that we manage with BOARD is
being able to observe, day by day, how the number of
BI users is continually increasing, and how within the
organisation there is a growing demand for new
information to manage day-to-day operations even
more effectively. This just goes to show how much
value the project has brought to end users.
Our idea of Business Intelligence has never been to
create extremely complex applications, but to create
simple and effective solutions that promote the
diffusion of a data analysis culture throughout a
young company that is able to grow and evolve
rapidly with changes in the business.
For its part, BOARD has proven itself ideally suited to
this concrete approach to managing company
information. This is due to its application flexibility,
which enables us to design and develop any analysis
application extremely quickly and without the
support of external consultants, as well as its capacity
to provide more expert business users with a fully
self-service BI environment that allows them to
independently generate dashboards, reports and ad-
hoc queries.
Outside of operational evaluations, it should be
noted that the project would not have been such a
great success without the crucial role played by the
Management Team. In fact the steering committee
itself was the first user of BOARD and the first
sponsor of the initiative. Its efforts to promote the
diffusion of information to all levels and spread the
idea of Business Intelligence as a continually evolving
project throughout the company have played a key
role in the creation of a solid information culture
within the company.
And it is on this basis, that our IT team has always
tried to fully exploit the flexibility of BOARD both by
adopting a prototypal approach to the construction of
applications in incremental steps, and by enabling a
large number of business users to become
independent in the creation of their analyses,
through to the dissemination of an adequate level of
understanding about the product throughout the
company.
The punctuality and ease of access to information
achieved through this approach have prevented the
proliferation of systems throughout the company
based on individually managed micro-computer tools
and the duplication of data, guaranteeing a single and
shared view of information at all times and at all
levels of the company, from operations to senior
management." explained the official source.