The company needed a business intelligence solution that provided access to a single, reliable source of information necessary to better understand their products, franchisees, and customers. They lacked the tools to efficiently gather and aggregate the data that was available at their multiple retail outlets and ultimately use it to distill actionable information about their customers and product performance. Data was being gathered at the franchise level in numerous point-of-sale (POS) systems across the organization. Not only was this information not easily accessible it was also difficult to correlate with other sources of internal and external data. Knowledge workers spent nearly 80 percent of their time manually gathering and piecing together data from the disparate systems before they could gain the insight needed to make decisions on product enhancements.

To help address these issues, the retailer sought a solutions provider with large-scale business intelligence and data warehouse implementation expertise.

CSI Solution

Conversion Services International (CSI), a business intelligence services provider, was firmly committed to helping the company meet its operational, financial, and competitive goals.

CSI worked with the client to create a business intelligence solution that would allow the client to leverage the huge quantities of data captured in the numerous POS systems and provide the business insight they sought. A data warehouse capable of storing, integrating and delivering large amounts of information was developed and analytical tools were established for analyzing the aggregated information. The solution was created using an open systems architecture which could later scale to accommodate the expected increase in franchises and the continually growing volumes of data collected.

The Marketing Analytics solution was created using an Oracle back-end database with Oracle Discover on the front end to create reports and analysis. The data could then be analyzed by various criteria such as same store/same week, day of week, weekday vs. weekend. These datasets could be further analyzed by order mode (counter vs. drive thru), register and tender type (coupon, gift certificates, loyalty card, etc.). Data Stewardship and Data Quality programs were also implemented to ensure ongoing, high quality information.

The client could now collect a daily feed of POS data from a representative sample of the franchise restaurants— over a billion rows of data from multiple POS systems every night — and aggregate it in the data warehouse along with other critical data and metrics such as retail information, profitability metrics, and third party information.

Return on Investment

The BI solution implemented provided a central point of access to information that was both understandable and usable by knowledge workers. This new BI application now serves as the primary system for data requests across the organization, and it has allowed the client to phase out redundant reporting systems. The time spent gathering information was reduced from weeks to just hours — allowing knowledge workers to spend more of their time on analysis instead of data compilation. These efficiencies alone made the project a success.

The business has benefited dramatically by gaining a thorough understanding of how each brand performs in various markets and which marketing promotions have the most impact in those markets. The client can better determine the products and services it needs to deliver to its franchisees and customers as well as effectively measure the impact of these business investments.

The data collection process continues to accelerate and user adoption of the system has become widespread. Now with an integrated, single trusted source of information the company has gained new insights into profitability, price elasticity, menu item performance, and market share. This ability to recognize opportunities for profitable business growth is critical to the company's strategic vision and continued success.


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