Luxury leather handbag, purses and accessories retailer, Radley is extending its use of Phocas Professional business intelligence (BI) software to support continued successful expansion in line with its ambitious growth plans.
The UK-based retailer has relied on the powerful capabilities of Phocas's BI software to support the rapid domestic and international growth it has enjoyed in recent years.
Radley CIO, Jack Paddison, said as a result of this growth period the retailer now has a 400-plus workforce and offices in the UK and Boston, US, with its own stores in the UK and US as well as a thriving wholesale and Ecommerce business.
"While, like the rest of the retail sector, we have felt the impact of the recession in places, promotional activity and High Street demand has seen us double our number of retail outlets in the last 18 months," he explained.
During this time the company has used a number of back-office systems to manage key operational processes, such as accounting, purchasing and warehousing. But the siloed nature of these systems and their discrete databases made the job of extracting meaningful data from them a difficult and manually intensive process.
Paddison said that none of the back-office systems offered timely and user friendly data analysis, which meant he and his IT and Analyst team needed to find a more efficient way of extracting, analysing and reporting on consolidated company performance data.
"Trying to produce consolidated data analysis manually, across the patchwork of databases that were in use, was challenging and very time consuming time we simply don't have," he explained.
Radley therefore evaluated a number of analytics tools, but found none that could support the wide range of databases its IT team had to manage. "They were either too slow, too complicated or didn't support the various databases in use," said Paddison, "that was, until we found Phocas."
He added that the Phocas BI software was able to support Radley's different back-office systems and that it was easy to use and implement. The company's subscription model has also offered Paddison the ability to scale with business requirements..
Some 20 people across Radley's business, in sales, IT, management and accounting, now rely on Phocas BI software to get an accurate, up-to-date view of business performance on which to base better business decisions. "We plan to extend it out to purchasing to manage demand forecasting, and are also experimenting with using Phocas for stock forecasting," said Paddison.
"The simple fact is Phocas is brilliant because it is quick, intuitive and pre-configured. Once you demonstrate these benefits to users it becomes a very easy solution to justify."
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