As part of the inte­gration of fashion retailer Gina Laura into the Popken Fashion Group port­folio, the company’s reporting system was to be standar­dized. Instead of operating two business intelli­gence solutions in parallel, the fashion retailer wanted to analyze data on all brands, goods, sales channels and stores using a uniform BI soft­ware. The data that needed to be connected origi­nated from various upstream systems. This includes the Futura retail system with data from around 600 stores (receipts, customer cards, stock, etc.), a mail order appli­cation with orders and invoices from around 1.8 million customers and a whole­sale appli­cation with orders, deli­veries and invoices from and to around 120 fran­chise and store loca­tions. In addition, there are sales reports from the store partners via EDI messages, stocks from the head offices from two ware­house manage­ment systems as well as article data, suppliers, purchase orders and incoming goods from the product data manage­ment and merchan­dise manage­ment systems. Data for analyses is provided in Microsoft SQL Server.­

In selecting a suitable business intelli­gence soft­ware, it was clear that the analysis and reporting solution used at Ulla Popken was to be replaced. „In particular, this soft­ware lacked the ability to carry out ad-hoc analyses using the self-service method as well as to create stan­dard reports,“ Dirk Spekker, Project Manager at Popken Fashion Services, explains. DeltaMaster was included in the evalu­ation along with a number of other stan­dard BI products. The soft­ware was already being used at Gina Laura before the merger – with great success. „We evalu­ated all products against our require­ments and remained with DeltaMaster with full con­viction,“ Spekker says. „We didn’t find another solu­tion that would have justified a change.“ Thanks to Bissantz’s com­pre­hen­sive technical expertise, the BI project was quickly imple­mented in collabo­rative work­shops. „We were able to create a proto­type and start intro­ducing the live system very quickly,“ Spekker confirms.