Analytics

MicroStrategy announced that House of Fraser, a leading British retailer, is leveraging MicroStrategy 10 to empower its employees with user-friendly, interactive dashboards to make quick data-driven business decisions. With revenues of over £1.3 billion and a workforce of more than 5,000 employees, House of Fraser is a leading British department store group with more than 60 stores across the UK and Ireland.

“The need for simplified, mobile-friendly data discovery tools that provide a single view of the entire enterprise has grown as more retailers seek to enhance and personalise the shopper experience,” said Francois Cadillon, MicroStrategy VP, UK, Ireland and South Europe. “MicroStrategy empowers retailers to discover actionable insights around sales, promotional content, demand forecasting, product merchandising, customer segments and more. Our data visualisations ultimately enable retailers to gain a better understanding of their customers and offer them the products and services they prefer.”

“By empowering people across the business with visualisation tools, MicroStrategy is enabling us to transform our business culture. Our teams easily understand what the visualisations reveal to us about the state of our business and can apply that to the day to day as well as to the strategic choices we make,” said Julian Burnett, CIO and Executive Director, House of Fraser. “MicroStrategy has enabled us to achieve a much clearer picture of the entire business and an understanding, for example, of the dynamics between people and space. By visualising data from IoT and other sources, we can optimise these dimensions, improve the customer journey and ultimately drive growth.”

Prior to 2017, House of Fraser’s analytics was restricted to large volumes of grid reports that were often printed and physically brought to meetings. In addition to the sizable printing costs, this approach frequently resulted in wasted time and conflicting data. Furthermore, the BI team would spend considerable time validating data and gathering business requirements in order to build a single dashboard.

As part of House of Fraser’s business transformation strategy, the retailer chose to streamline its analytics environment and make greater use of visualisations in order to provide users with actionable insights. House of Fraser introduced nGenBI, its analytics initiative, and rolled out the first in a series of interactive dashboards on MicroStrategy 10 aimed at transforming the way employees interact with and consume data. The BI team has subsequently rolled out pixel-perfect documents, self-service data discovery, advanced analytics, mobile reporting, and MicroStrategy Office™ to its user community.

The nGenBI initiative has completely changed the way that employees at House of Fraser uncover new insights. It has enabled the BI team to focus on higher-value reports and eliminate data processing redundancies that previously resulted in performance bottlenecks. Additionally, self-service data discovery enables House of Fraser’s business users to take analytics into their own hands and quickly answer complex business questions by building user-friendly, interactive dashboards in as little as 20 minutes — completely changing the way that dashboards are designed, built, and used across the organisation. This empowers employees across all departments to quickly visualise data to improve stock management, reduce returns, optimise store layouts, and enhance the overall customer experience.

By analyzing returns data, House of Fraser has been able to dramatically improve their returns process. The retailer has also empowered users from marketing, merchandising, store operations, and supply chain to use MicroStrategy to leverage data science techniques to deliver tangible value to the business. They can now visualise real-time customer flow data to see how customers physically move through their brick-and-mortar stores – a critical tool for improving the in-store customer experience. To learn more about House of Fraser’s BI and analytics journey, click here.

“Using MicroStrategy’s platform, our employees can pull together a data set, apply it to a data model and visualise it all within minutes,” said Steve Limbirons, Business Intelligence Programme Manager, House of Fraser. “That is a huge step forward for us. Self-service data discovery enables our business users, regardless of their technical skill or role, to take analytics into their own hands and quickly answer complex business questions on-the-fly.”

MicroStrategy is set to play a key role in House of Fraser’s continued business transformation. In addition to tapping additional data sources and expanding their community of engaged business users, House of Fraser plans to roll out the latest MicroStrategy 10.9™ features, leverage the R analytics bundle, and expand their use of mobile analytics.