Puma Pounces on Board
Puma Pounces on Board
May/June Edition, 2008: Spiralling sales for Puma Australia meant an increased demand for sales analytics as well as consolidated reporting.
The company famous for leaping cat logo has been a footballing icon since World War 2 but a jump in popularity with Generation Y has seen burgeoning retail sales.
Pressure for better sales analytics from its own retail outlets across saw Ben Dallenger, IT director for Puma Australia, call for tenders for a national Business Intelligence (BI) solution.
“On top of the fast evolving retail strategy we were being driven by the US to use the same Point of Sale system worldwide,” said Dallenger. “Data had to be collated between databases and was fast becoming a nightmare.”
“The reporting requirements for retail are different to wholesale and use different parameters and entities. Additionally a lot of the entities are not available in the POS system and the retail sales have to be parsed and collated against the required entities held on our DB2 databases before being loaded into Board,” he said
Dallenger and his team opened up a proof of concept, where 40,000 of Puma’s own records would be used for the demonstrations. The tender was finally awarded to the Board Management Intelligence Toolkit (MIT).
“The Board option meant we didn’t have to buy a new data warehousing solution, it also meant we wouldn’t have a constant stream of people ask for a report in a set format as it would all be set in the software,” said Dallenger
The solution is being fed sales data from Puma’s eight stores in Australia, with the data being available he following morning after a nightly download from each of the store. The entire system has been data warehouse free from it’s inception, with all data being extracted from legacy DB2 systems and loaded into Board.
Puma’s information systems environment runs off an IBM i-series for wholesale business applications such as radio frequency scan packing, accounts receivable and customer service. Retail applications run in an Intel environment as does the mail and back-office Microsoft Software. All of Puma’s New Zealand and Australian operations run off a centralised data centre in Melbourne with remote locations linked via a public VPN.
Information available through?the BI application includes sales?analytics, Inventory analysis, Order analysis and trendlines.
It can also be used for budget planning and forecasting as well as Complex Puma International reporting requirements.
The implementation itself took around two weeks, which included four days of training for Puma staff members; this was conducted by International Systems Integrators, the distributors of Board in Australia.
Initial results were so successful that Puma decided to roll out the software to more and more users and a staff member who later took over operations at Puma New Zealand was so impressed with it that Board was rolled out across the Tasman as well.
“MIT recommend the Board client for higher performance whether locally or remote. The client uses a stripped down http protocol which gives NZ and other remote users very good performance. Almost all applications can be accessed using the web.”
According to Dallenger, once the client dashboard is loaded in a remote location the performance is very good, with users generating their own reports and no longer asking IT. The greatest benefit Puma Australia saw from the BI system was no additional reports in the ERP system being created since the platform was first brought online.
“Another positive is the tracking of our online store, we’re now analysing the data geographically and we use that data to plan future retail outlets where products are selling particularly well.”