House of Fraser upgrades analytics platform

Written by Chris Lemmon

31/10/2017

British department store group House of Fraser has rolled out new analytics technology from MicroStrategy to provide employees with an interactive dashboard for assessing business performance.

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 business intelligence (BI) team would spend considerable time validating data and gathering business requirements in order to build a single dashboard.

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 new initiative has enabled the BI team to focus on higher-value reports and eliminate data processing redundancies. Additionally, self-service data discovery enables House of Fraser’s business users to quickly answer complex business questions by building user-friendly, interactive dashboards in as little as 20 minutes — changing the way that dashboards are designed, built, and used across the organisation.

This in turn enables employees across all departments to quickly visualise data to improve stock management, reduce returns, optimise store layouts, and enhance the overall customer experience. Employees can also 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.

Steve Limbirons, business intelligence programme manager at House of Fraser, said: “Using MicroStrategy’s platform, our employees can pull together a data set, apply it to a data model and visualise it all within minutes. 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.”