Faster retail analytics, more accurate reporting, and deep insights
Faster retail analytics, more accurate reporting, and deep insights: South African retail group, The Foschini Group (TFG), has faster access to disparate data sets, more accurate reporting and more intelligent decision-making thanks to Decision Intelligence.
Headquartered in Cape Town, The Foschini Group (TFG) has 4,000 stores in 32 countries, and 29 retail brands that trade in fashion, jewellery, accessories, sporting apparel and furniture. The firm has grown rapidly through acquisition, amassing complex back-office systems along the way.
The retailer has about 20 different data sources, and pockets of analytics for merchandising, financials, logistics, ecommerce, and manufacturing were run across different on-prem and cloud systems, including SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services (AWS). With a multitude of hybrid systems, TFG’s existing solution wasn’t powerful enough to give them quick, accurate and deep insights. In addition, they lacked the ability to combine and analyse data from their current technical stack.
“We process around 20 million records daily just for our stock-at-hand inventory, which was too much for Microsoft Power BI and Tableau to handle,” says TFG’s senior department manager in charge of BI projects.
TFG’s BI team was spending weeks moving data around to create comprehensive financial reports for buyers and planners, and dashboards for monthly board meetings.
In addition to fast and multi-source direct data access, TFG needed the ability to easily produce deeper insights, and supply governed, AI-guided self-service to a diverse pool of workers. Plus, they wanted to reduce cloud operational costs and integrate their disparate systems.
TFG’s BI team knew a single-platform approach would be the best way to address the scale and complexity of the data the business generated.
The solution: Retail insights with Pyramid Analytics
TFG selected Pyramid to be the de facto decision intelligence platform for the entire group, because the Pyramid Decision Intelligence Platform, a one-stop-shop for any analytics need, treats multiple data sets as a single shared resource, with an aggregated view into everything — from a single SKU to margins and profitability.
“Pyramid was significantly faster than anything else out there,” says TFG’s senior department manager of BI projects. “It integrated easily with all our systems, including letting us run our sales in near-real time in BW/4HANA, and it was much better at bringing different data sets together.”
TFG wanted to avoid moving data around, and Pyramid provided them with a single view of data pulled from four business streams: merchandise management, financials, eCommerce, and a clothes-manufacturing arm. Each has its own systems and applications, on and off premises, drawing on a wide range of vendors, including SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and AWS.
Pyramid integrated analytics and directly accessed data from all the data sources into a single, unified, governed analytics environment, without data extraction or duplication, in a frictionless, integrated pipeline.
TFG is also using Pyramid’s intuitive interface both to deliver more relevant data to people more quickly and to improve data literacy across the organization.
“People don’t need three days of training on Pyramid like you do with other BI products,” says TFG’s senior department manager of BI projects. “If you work in Excel, you can use Pyramid. That’s the bottom line.”
For more information on how Pyramid Analytics can help you elevate your retail analytics, visit www.pyramidanalytics.com
