Helzberg Diamonds Shines With WebFOCUS

Jewelry Retailer Analyzes Operational Data to Boost Revenue and Anticipate Market Trends

Helzberg Diamonds is a fine jewelry retailer with 3,000 employees and 233 stores in 39 states. To seize the high ground in a competitive industry highly dependent on holiday sales, Helzberg needed to renovate its business intelligence (BI) platform to enable managers to analyze point-of-sale (POS) and other operational data, respond more quickly to market trends,and boost productivity in nearly every facet of its business.

When the company’s existing reporting tools proved unable to seamlessly access information in a new database, and make it readily available to those who needed it most, Helzberg turned to the WebFOCUS BI platform from Information Builders.

“We’re using our new BI system to analyze data from our network of stores, to evaluate the marketplace, detect buying trends, and track promotional effectiveness,” says Greg Backhus, director of data warehousing and BI for Helzberg Diamonds. “By quickly responding to subtle trends in our customers’ behavior, we can more readily understand which products they want and the type of service they need.”

As a result of these improvements in BI technology, Helzberg expects to see measurable improvement in company-wide efficiency by enabling decision-makers to access valuable metrics faster than ever before, solidifying its leadership in the fine jewelry marketplace.

“I don’t think there’s any jewelry retailer of our size doing the same kind of sophisticated data analysis that we’re now doing with WebFOCUS,” Backhus says. “These BI tools make us more nimble and efficient, so we adapt more quickly than the competition. That’s a competitive advantage in our industry.”

A Partnership Proposal With WebFOCUS

Helzberg Diamonds has been providing fine jewelry to customers for nearly 100 years. It has gone through plenty of operational updates and information technology overhauls, the most recent of which entailed a switch to the Netezza platform, a high-powered data warehouse appliance. Previously, it used BI technology from Brio/Hyperion to report against an enterprise data warehouse created with IBM DB2 as the basis for operational reporting. Other reporting is done using Oracle Hyperion and Essbase.

“The migration to Netezza was a great success, but we needed a BI toolset that could fully leverage this unique database,” explains Backhus. “That brought Information Builders into the picture. We were looking for cutting-edge BI functionality to augment the new database environment.”

In the course of an exhaustive vendor-evaluation process, Backhus and his team scrutinized a wide variety of BI tools. What ultimately set Information Builders apart was its support for interactive dashboards and its report-distribution capabilities. WebFOCUS also offered greater overall ease of use, which the organization needed to ensure continued success in a highly competitive environment.

Another key differentiator was connectivity to a broad set of databases and applications. For example, WebFOCUS can seamlessly retrieve information from such sources as Microsoft SQL Server, JD Edwards, Hyperion Essbase, and Netezza. Previously, Helzberg’s BI department was spending an hour a day manually pulling data from disparate sources to create sales dashboards for regional managers. Once completed, each of those regional managers would take those dashboards, manipulate the information they contained in Excel or other formats, and distribute the results to each store manager. Every morning, 35 highly paid regional managers were spending their first hour sorting through Excel spreadsheets, a huge drain on productivity.

“Eliminating this effort alone resulted in substantial ROI,” says Backhus.

Building a Multifaceted BI Application

Information Builders Professional Services helped Helzberg to get started, and some of the company’s key developers also attended training classes. Initially, the team focused on replacing some outdated reports, with an emphasis on saving time and improving efficiency. They also created dashboards, scorecards,and an automated environment for running and delivering daily reports to management. They ultimately replaced nearly 100 Brio reports, including their daily net sales, merchandising, divisional statistic, and vendor reports; store-level and associate-level scorecards; and a variety of point-of-sale analytics.

“These types of reports are the lifeblood of the company,” explains Backhus.“Managers were accustomed to waking up in the morning and immediately checking their sales reports in the old system, so it was important to get the new ones up and running as soon as possible.”

Helzberg hit the ground running with WebFOCUS. While it was replacing these key reports, the company made great strides toward enhancing its merchandising capabilities with new reporting and metrics. It added alerts and drill-down capabilities using WebFOCUS Active Technologies, placing more flexibility and control into the hands of business users.

Making Day-to-Day Operations Shine

Helzberg uses a POS system designed for specialty retailers. Helzberg uploads this data nightly from the individual stores, performs data quality checks to ensure that the numbers are accurate, and then loads it into a Netezza data warehouse at headquarters. After the data has been loaded and cleansed, the WebFOCUS reports and dashboards are automatically refreshed with current data.

“This nightly data upload and distribution process is the pulse of the operation,” says Backhus. “The POS data flows through all of our systems, informing just about everyone at the company about the updated metrics. It also flows into the merchandise system, informing current inventory and on-hand information, which is fed back into the data warehouse for merchandising reporting.”

The same information is pushed out to store managers in the form of reports and dashboards that help them examine product category sales and identify trends in promotions and other store-specific information, like individual associate performance, credit sales,and extended care plan performance. The system is deployed at about 230 stores within the company. In addition, 30 regional managers have their own WebFOCUS dashboards. Helzberg also uses the dashboards and scorecards to provide campaign management statistics to outside vendors, so these partners know what’s selling and can plan accordingly.

“Insight from the BI environment helps us up-sell and provide additional value to our customers and partners, while also increasing our average sale,” says Backhus. “Our managers have really adopted and endorsed the new system. The new BI platform is providing transparency to all areas of their business, which we hope leads to more productive, happy users.”

Fine jewelry is a highly competitive sector of the retail market, and the depth of information and rapid access to information provided by this new BI system helps Helzberg to gain and maintain a competitive edge.

“Timely and accurate reporting is helping the entire company to make better business decisions,” adds Backhus. “We can access current, accurate information in a way that’s easily understood, manipulated, and analyzed.”

Removing the Tarnish From Legacy Procedures

Before the new WebFOCUS system was in place, regional managers used to spend a considerable amount of time loading relational data into Excel spreadsheets. Different regional managers had different ways of looking at the data and manipulating it, leading to conflicting results. WebFOCUS puts accurate, consistent data directly into their spreadsheets, enforcing consistency while placing powerful analysis capabilities at their fingertips.

“By eliminating rogue spreadsheet activities, we made sure that managers can trust the data,” says Backhus. “They know that the numbers are right and that the data is presented consistently across all of their reports.”

Managers can change the output formats and use various metrics to slice-and-dice the information as they see fit. Since the IT department maintains the data, everyonestarts with the same sanctioned informationeach time, so their numbers roll up consistently.

Helzberg is now focused on enhancing its merchandise-reporting capabilities, delivering custom financial dashboards and developing parameterized reports for various teams throughout the organization. It also plans to extend mobile analytics to PDAs and smartphones and use the WebFOCUS Essbase connector to access multidimensional data stored in its Oracle Hyperion environment.