Success Story of Woolworth

Deutsche Woolworth GmbH and Co. OHG is a Frankfurt, Germany based retailer with operations in Germany and Austria. Currently it operates about 444 stores with an average store size of 10,000 square feet, and employs more than 14,700 people. Woolworth stores carry a variety of general merchandise including apparel, electronics, music and video, toys, home accessories, and offers a deep discount proposition to t;heir customers.

Challenges - Growing needs, limited analytics

Woolworth managed its analytic needs using an internally architected data warehouse, along with a leading generic BI software. Since deployment, Woolworth frequently changed the data warehouse design and architecture in order to tactically meet immediate and changing reporting needs. The data warehouse integrated data from custom developed source systems (for Sales, Merchandising, Inventory and Promotions), Tradestone purchasing and i2 planning. The platform's architecture and deployment was becoming unwieldy to maintain, customize and scale as Woolworth's business grew. The complexity and dynamism of Woolworth's business was placing an increasing strain on the existing business intelligence platform. The system was unable to create new reports, meet ad-hoc reporting needs and perform complex queries like category margin performance for the business users. Woolworth was incurring heavy expenditure on IT resources for managing and maintaining the DW. Extracting, transforming and loading more than a million sales invoices a day from over 400 stores was becoming an increasingly difficult task with the current ETL and DW design. As the number of their business users grew, the Incremental BI licensing cost was becoming prohibitive for extending

usage across the enterprise.

ARC gives enterprise BI scalability to Woolworth

Woolworth selected ARC of Manthan Systems as its enterprise BI-DW solution of choice. ARC's retail data model and retail data warehousing architecture gave Woolworth a better underlying design that maintained architectural integrity and robustness as its business and data volumes grew. The Hybrid OLAP, retail-centric data warehouse design understands and anticipates retail data structures, optimizes query performance, aggregation and cubing, to ensure superior performance and a BI scalable platform. ARC's retail data model coupled with an actionable BI front-end gave Woolworth's business comprehensive, cross-functional analytical coverage. This helped institutionalize performance analysis and reporting across multiple business functions in the organization. ARC's simplified licensing model that fosters incremental enterprise usage in growing businesses, was another decisive factor for its selection. ARC was quickly deployed in Woolworth because of its pre-built nature. The deployment was on a IBM P-Series Linux system running a IBM DB2 400 database server. Sales, Merchandising, Vendor, Promotions and Inventory functions of the data model were enabled at deployment.

Benefits of a retail-centric BI design

The superior retail-centric DW design, smart aggregation capability and optimized storage/retrieval mechanism reduced Woolworth's average enterprise reporting time from over 30 minutes to less than 30 seconds. Users now have all the analytics they needed and more, accessible at the click of a button. Exception management, alerting and scheduled reporting features of ARC provided

actionable reporting and analysis capabilities to Woolworth's managers. Important reports like supplier performance analysis, best and worst sellers, promotion effectiveness, pricing performance, product range performance, stock performance and margin performance are now available to business with a host of drilling, filtering, and multidimensional analysis features. Store managers collaborate with category managers using ARC's collaboration utilities like KPI alerting, scheduled promotion progress monitoring, daily sales report bursting, and enterprise email integration. ARC simplified Woolworth's BI support and maintenance capabilities. The deployment is today administered by a team of only 2

people internally even as BI usage increased from 150 to 200 users. The rapid deployment of ARC lowered the Total Cost of Ownership for BI-DW infrastructure, as ARC is database and platform independent, and it seamlessly integrated with the existing Infrastructure. ARC's optimized warehousing design reduced data redundancy from 1.5 terabytes to 250 gigabytes. In the end, Woolworth's BI-DW management overhead costs reduced by almost 50 percent.