An InfoCepts solution helped trickle down P&L responsibility to a more granular level within individual stores – thereby fostering a culture of intrapreneurship, data-driven decision making, and financial prudence
In a secure and scalable way, InfoCepts successfully delivered a unique, award-winning solution for space profitability analytics. It directly led to $1.5M cost savings per annum, widespread adoption, and flexibility in analysis.
Data silos – Data for sales, margins, various costs (rent, commissions, payroll), traffic, and labor hours had to be converged to compute profitability. Stored in disconnected systems, it was managed by functionally diverse and geographically separated teams.
Inconsistent business rules – But integrating disparate data sources wasn’t all. Following a non-standard approach, the aggregated numbers had to be split among each retail space using allocation rules for sales and varied costs.
No automation – The existing manual process for computing space profitability was effort-intensive, slow, and error-prone. Bulky Excel reports were created for each location every month and distributed over shared drives.
Lack of visibility – At the brand space-level, a single P&L view across locations wasn’t available. Monthly, per-location computations were done in separate spreadsheets, making it cumbersome to get an aggregated quarterly view or sort data by categories and regions.
No data governance – There being no data security, anyone with spreadsheet access could look at sensitive enterprise information. And there was no way to handle data quality and business rule-mismatch issues.
A comprehensive solution demanded a collaborative effort between IT, store operations, merchandising, and financial planning and analysis (FP&A) functions. InfoCepts led a cross-functional team of senior stakeholders on the customer side in a series of data and requirement assessment workshops. These helped define the best approach to meet the following business objectives:
Leveraging our proven design methodology, InfoCepts developed an all-in-one solution that provides the following:
The Customer
Our customer is one of the world’s leading luxury travel retailers, selling as well as leasing space to 700+ global marquee brands. Its stores are operated at airports and downtown gallerias in major tourist attractions in over 28 countries. The company employs over 9,000 people worldwide-all focused on creating inspiring retail experiences for its customers.
Industry
Retail
Business Function
Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A)
Solution
Business Apps
Technologies
MicroStrategy, IBM DataStage, Snowflake
Geography
APAC
Year of Deployment
2019
Feedback from key merchant and operations management has been phenomenal. No doubt the Space Profitability tool is a game-changer for brand performance analysis. Workload savings and the ability to run every location based on a timeframe a user chooses means more time can be devoted to action planning.”
Fast-forward to our customer’s annual awards ceremony, where the InfoCepts space profitability solution won the award for innovation and collaboration. Handing P&L responsibility on a highly granular level to each store fostered a culture of intrapreneurship, data-driven decision making and financial prudence.
Our customer realized productivity gains of 5400 man-hours of manual effort, directly yielding a cost savings of $1.5M per year. Other value-added benefits include:
Widespread adoption – Enjoying a 3X increase in its user base, business functions coverage rose from two to seven. The InfoCepts solution has become the mostly used across the organization.
Increased scope – Designed to seamlessly include future locations, the solution rolled out to 43 locations that manage over 660K sq. ft. of premium real estate space.
Flexibility in analysis – Easy access and ability to slice and dice retail data across multiple dimensions has provided our customer with more informed decision making.
Security – Fine-grained, role-based access ensures that locations, products, and costs are only visible to those having authorized user roles and profiles.
Nimble and objective decision making – The customer’s users are easily able to answer questions such as ‘Which brands to assign a bigger space or demote to multi-brand area,’ ‘Which costs are eating away net profit,’ ‘Given its cost structure, what commercial terms will ensure profitability.’
Enable self-service analytics to empower users InfoCepts partnered with the business teams to develop a successful self-service solution for retail customer analytics Read Story
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