Arcadia Outfitted in the Latest BI

With more than 2,000 branches throughout the UK, Arcadia is the country's largest clothing retailer, reaching customers through eight brands in the UK and a growing number of international stores. There is hardly a high street or shopping center across the UK that does not have one or more of Arcadia's eight celebrated brands – Burton, Dorothy Perkins, Evans, Miss Selfridge, Outfit, Topshop, Topman, and Wallis. Arcadia generated more than $3.5 billion in revenue in its 2006 financial year.

The retail industry today is ferociously competitive with consumer loyalty no longer guaranteed as it once was. To meet this new environment, retailers are seeking new ways to find a competitive edge. One of the most critical is the ability to access and analyze accurate, consistent, and timely information. Arcadia recognized this need, and in the late 1990s, embarked on a major data warehouse project with IBM to centralize information for its international, group finance, and branch merchandising teams, which would allow better access to data and enable more informed decision-making.

By 2005, Arcadia had created a highly robust, well structured data warehouse for its central operations, which was supplemented by a business intelligence (BI) tool to provide reports to around 200 users. However, Arcadia recognized that it needed to extend the solution across the enterprise to also include the buyers and merchandisers of the eight trading brands. These teams were using legacy applications, which had become inflexible and restrictive in Arcadia's international strategy, such as lacking multi-channel access or multi-currency functionality.

Driving Business Intelligence Across the Enterprise

Arcadia wanted to extend its business intelligence solution from its current user base of just 200 to nearly 1,000. However, it also knew that it would in the future look to roll-out the solution to all branch stores (currently more than 2,000 in the UK), resulting in a solution that would be accessible to over 5,000 users.

Arcadia undertook a detailed review of the incumbent MicroStrategy solution as well as those from other leading business intelligence vendors including Information Builders. After evaluating suppliers, Arcadia selected Information Builders WebFOCUS because of its strong architecture, ease of deployment, and cost effectiveness. Arcadia also liked WebFOCUS' close integration with the IBM iSeries and the look and feel of the solution from an end user perspective. Finally, and most importantly for the company, was Information Builders' proven ability to scale its solutions in the largest environments, which Arcadia recognized as vital to ensuring the organization embraced business intelligence.

David Hale, supply chain controller, Arcadia Group, said, "We needed to move away from providing business intelligence to just a few hundred users and look to empower thousands with information to help them do their jobs better. By selecting WebFOCUS, we have an operational business intelligence solution that will drive information into the hands of users and therefore help shape and drive the business forward."

Arcadia was also pleased that with Information Builders there were no additional IT investment demands with regards to updating its data warehouse infrastructure to support the software. Several other business intelligence vendors would not support the IBM-based environment, but because Information Builders is designed to work in any environment it was able to be deployed easily and cost effectively on top of the IBM data warehouse.

Driving Benefits Across the Business

With its previous business intelligence system, Arcadia had created more than 1,000 system and end user-built reports. This was becoming overly complex and after a review of all reports, Arcadia used WebFOCUS to rationalize the number of reports down to 100 key management reports that covered all business requirements. In addition, through the solution's flexibility, end users could create their own reports based on parameters set by the IT team within WebFOCUS. A key part of the training was getting staff to re-build their previous MicroStrategy-based reports in WebFOCUS. This ensured users got the reports they needed to do their job better while embracing the new solution.

"The intuitive nature of WebFOCUS meant we could train the staff on its functionality and at the same time get them to build reports for their job, which we knew would ensure user support of the solution. One of the biggest barriers we wanted to overcome was user adoption and by taking a training-based approach we have 100 percent user support of the WebFOCUS tool, and in fact have already seen staff using it in creative and beneficial ways for the business," said Hale.

Staff at Arcadia are now able to deliver reports in a timely, sometimes on-demand, manner to help them make decisions. This operational business intelligence solution has enabled users to analyze information to make informed decisions whether finance, marketing, purchasing, or merchandise oriented.

One example of how WebFOCUS has benefited Arcadia is through improved basket analysis. The group is now able to analyze how shop window displays drive additional sales of clothes within ranges and what are the best combinations of clothing within stores. This enables Arcadia stores to mix and match clothes depending on customer behavior and drive customer purchasing.

"Right now, jeans and jackets are hot items within men's fashion. But we need to know what type of jean and what type of jacket work best together. Prior to WebFOCUS, we had to work on experience and basic tools to make decisions, but now we can analyze the data quickly and change displays overnight and therefore be more dynamic to the needs of our customers," explained Hale.

In addition to basket analysis, WebFOCUS is also being used in trials very effectively. Arcadia's brands can now try different combinations and compare whether the trial stores are performing better than those not in trials. A report can be produced and decisions made quickly and easily based on the information.

The Future

One of the key reasons for selecting Information Builders was scalability. According to Hale, Arcadia will seek over the next few years to roll out WebFOCUS across all its stores in the UK so staff in the field can make changes in store to help drive even more sales out of every branch.

Arcadia also plans to re-develop its legacy management information using the IBM DB2 Enterprise data warehouse and WebFOCUS, helping to consolidate the delivery and access of information for all staff onto a single, easy-to-use system.

"WebFOCUS is transforming the way we access and deliver information across the organization. We are empowering users with timely, accurate, and consistent information to help every employee make faster and better decisions. By doing so we are ensuring that every user's contribution can have a positive influence on the business," concluded Hale.