Elie Tahari Ltd. Unveils New End-User Reporting Framework

Snapshot

Organization Elie Tahari, Ltd. (www.elietahari.com), a leading designer of women's fashions.

The Challenge Provide executives and department managers with a current view of business processes and streamline data retrieval methods for end users.

The Strategy Create a business intelligence system that can push pertinent business information to executives and provide self-service reports for end users in orders, inventory, sales, and finance.

The Results A 15 percent reduction in a key shipping-delivery process, vastly improved visibility into production and sales activity, enhanced data security, and simplified information retrieval operations.

Information Builders Solution WebFOCUS Managed Reporting Environment, Developer Studio, ReportCaster, and Executive Dashboard.

A lot has changed in the world of fashion since the tube top first made its captivating appearance in the 1970s. Likewise, a lot has changed in the world of executive decision making. In 1974, when Elie Tahari Ltd. was a small boutique located on Madison Avenue in New York, business intelligence tools were virtually nonexistent. Today, Elie Tahari enjoys a reputation as an industry pioneer – partly because of its ability to quickly react to market trends. The high-end retailer has rounded the retail power curve by cutting through traditional business channels and rethinking conventional notions of shopping.

Elie Tahari uses WebFOCUS to help sales managers and executives stay abreast of precisely what is happening in the business. Its business intelligence initiatives have improved visibility into production and sales activity, enhanced data security, simplified information retrieval operations, and helped reduce costs by 15 percent for a key shipping-delivery process.

"Taking full advantage of the capabilities of WebFOCUS, we have built a business intelligence architecture that is both robust and flexible," says Susannah Jones, information architect and WebFOCUS developer at Elie Tahari. "WebFOCUS allows us to process information quickly and generate executive level reports so we can make immediate decisions."

With headquarters in New York City, Elie Tahari (www.elietahari.com) was instrumental in revolutionizing the way retailers present designer collections when the shop-in-shop concept emerged in the 1970s. Bloomingdale's, Neiman Marcus, and Saks Fifth Avenue each created a dedicated space within their stores to carry the Elie Tahari Collection, and designed the space according to Mr. Tahari's specifications. In 2002, the Elie Tahari Collection Web site continued the company's reputation for innovation.

In keeping with this reputation as an innovator, Elie Tahari sought a business intelligence solution that would help the company spot trends and take advantage of business opportunities. Vice President Mickey Klein considered a variety of solutions before selecting Information Builders' WebFOCUS. "We favored WebFOCUS because of its long history of success, the fact that its native language has such depth, and because so many people in the labor market have the WebFOCUS skill set," he recalls.

The Right Fit

Since then, WebFOCUS software has become the foundation of a series of business intelligence initiatives that provide current information to employees throughout the corporation. Elie Tahari worked with Sky IT Group, an Information Builders reseller and InfoElite partner, to get the project off the ground. The first deliverable was a self-service reporting application, which Klein named InSeam. Jones and her team used the WebFOCUS Managed Reporting Environment, Developer Studio, and ReportCaster to create the new system, and built a self-service front-end to deliver it.

"We adapted to the software quickly," Jones recalls. "There wasn't much of a learning curve. The native FOCUS language is unbeatable. There is an almost infinite number of things we can do on the fly because of the multi-segment file structure, the user-definable functions and variables, and the simple yet useful feature of being able to sum alpha fields. If you have ever needed to make a cross tab where the element in the middle is a character string, and not a number, then you will understand the significance of this. Excel can't do it. Access can't do it. But it's a piece of cake for WebFOCUS. Cartesian products are another good example – they are difficult for most tools, but WebFOCUS handles them with ease."

Elie Tahari uses an IBM AS/400 to host an industry-standard operations package called Apparel Computer Systems, written by Computer Generated Solutions, Inc., to supply operational data to WebFOCUS. WebFOCUS runs on an HP ProLiant DL380 G3 server powered by Dual Pentium Xeon Processors running Microsoft Windows NT, and accesses a data warehouse on an AS/400 server.

Tailoring the System

By leveraging this modern IT infrastructure, InSeam enables authorized users to obtain self-service reports in four basic areas: orders, inventory, sales, and finance. Many of the reports include pictures of the pertinent merchandise, and all are accessible via standard Web browsers. Users can export any of InSeam's tables to Microsoft Excel with a simple mouse click.

"We've built data marts that allow users to customize their reports," Jones explains. "Hyperlink drill-downs extend to more detailed reports. These hyperlinks are recursive – they never end. Every table links somewhere else, should the user want more information."

A mathematician, Jones says she was drawn to WebFOCUS because the underlying 4GL is linguistically consistent. "That's the brilliance of the whole thing," she exclaims. "If you think something should work a certain way, and you write it that way and you try it…lo and behold it does!"

Jones and her colleagues also appreciate the robust distribution capabilities of the WebFOCUS environment. Using WebFOCUS ReportCaster, every report in InSeam can be sent by e-mail on a scheduled or ad hoc basis. "ReportCaster is so valuable. We use it as a general scheduler in our ETL processes against our legacy databases, as well as to distribute reports," Jones says.

For example, each day Klein automatically gets an e-mail message summarizing that day's financial and order status. "The reports instantly reveal what happened yesterday, last week, or last month," he says. "I can click through the data and drill down if I want more information."

Similarly, every sales executive receives weekly reports highlighting orders that need immediate attention. Embedded hyperlinks initiate other WebFOCUS programs within the InSeam system. Elie Tahari also uses WebFOCUS to analyze point-of-sale data from major department store chains. "Each week we receive data from our EDI vendor," Jones explains. "We warehouse the results on our server and combine them with our shipments and inventory files to create a comprehensive FOCUS reporting database."

According to Klein, having this information accessible has allowed Elie Tahari to reduce the inventory in its warehouse and respond more quickly to the needs of its retail customers. "In our industry, if you can react by Tuesday evening to the previous week's sales data, you are ahead of the game," explains Klein. "With WebFOCUS, we have the information we need by Monday afternoon. We can see what we sold in every store by item and size, and instantly compare it to other merchandise, or to the same merchandise from a previous period. This allows us to react to sell-throughs on the department store floors in a timely manner. We can quickly deliver the styles and sizes that are selling to the appropriate stores, so we can sell more goods. This heightened responsiveness is all due to WebFOCUS and Information Builders."

Jones believes these WebFOCUS applications are helping to make information retrieval processes much less labor intensive for users. "Many employees formerly used Microsoft Access to pull data from our legacy systems," she says. "WebFOCUS gives them an easier way to access the information. A single mouse click exports the information to the Excel environment."

For example, Jones and her team used WebFOCUS to create a revenue-versus-cost report that reveals gross margin, year-to-date growth, and other pertinent information. "We added lots of additional functionality that was not available in Excel, such as different ways of measuring time – from a consumer's point of view, a manufacturer's point of view, and somewhere in between," she says.

Ready to Wear

Now that WebFOCUS is handling business intelligence activities, Elie Tahari is seeing direct improvements in productivity, workflow, and cost savings. For example, the orders component of InSeam helps close loopholes in the sales and production pipeline.

"Sales execs are constantly informed of the status of their accounts and of matters that need immediate attention," Jones adds. "Similarly, the production team always knows if orders are shipped on time. We're working toward a real-time view of market demand, so we can instantly step up production of successful items. For example, if a particular style that just went on the floor is selling above projection, we can actually affect production and cut more of that style to respond to what customers are buying."

Security capabilities inherent in the WebFOCUS Managed Reporting Environment allow developers to group users into domains, thereby limiting what information they can access. For example, only authorized accounting personnel can view financial reports, and sales reports are segmented by division. "With WebFOCUS MRE, that functionality takes almost no effort to set up," Jones says.

In a fashion company, where image is always important, WebFOCUS delivers current business intelligence via a visually appealing interface that can display pictures of apparel and easily export information to familiar formats like Excel and PDF (see image below). Looking ahead, Jones plans to move from the existing self-service mode to the Executive Dashboard, taking advantage of Knowledge Mapping to increase the options available to users. She would also like to create multidimensional reporting tables with WebFOCUS Fusion.

"Our new system is flexible, meaning we can slot things into just the right place when something new happens, and robust, meaning it actually works under pressure," concludes Jones. "This is a fast-moving industry and we're making fast progress with WebFOCUS. The software is very valuable to us."