CASE STUDY - Aquascutum Innovates in Retail
- By Robin Coles
- May 8, 2007
Commentary by Robin Coles, Business Development Manager, Prologic Customer Overview
Aquascutum was founded in 1851 by a tailor in the heart of Mayfair, London. Aquascutum’s early business was focused on developing an innovative new attribute for its coats: the “shower-proofing” of wools. Today, Aquascutum is a leading fashion house that offers designer clothing for men and women, luggage, and accessories.
Business Challenge
Aquascutum relies on CIMS, a dedicated retail management application, from Prologic to manage key areas of the business, including merchandising, warehousing, distribution, allocation, replenishment, and sourcing. CIMS is an end-to-end enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that has been deployed at more than 35 fashion and lifestyle companies in the U.K.
In the dynamic world of fashion, retailers such as Aquascutum need timely access to detailed business information, enabling them to react to trends while managing inventory and making a host of other critical business decisions. Aquascutum uses Prologic’s sophisticated reporting tool—CIMS Vision—to deliver the information required within its dynamic business. However, as the data volumes and requirements have grown, the company began to find that the system lacked the back-end power required to deliver timely information. As a result, a number of reports slowed to the point where basic information could take several hours to generate.
In addition, Aquascutum was anxious to better exploit the information CIMS Vision provided by generating ad hoc and “what if” analyses; this had proved impractical due to the sheer volume of data contained within its data warehouse.
The Solution
To meet this need, Prologic integrated HyperRoll into the Aquascutum CIMS Vision application. Aquascutum can now provide its users with lightning-fast reporting capabilities and enable users to perform increasingly sophisticated queries. HyperRoll combines patented query acceleration, caching, and compression algorithms to deliver immediate and substantial improvements in business intelligence performance. HyperRoll’s technology works seamlessly alongside CIMS Vision to accelerate data loading by up to factors of 200, while enabling access and analysis of data in unparalleled detail.
Enormous amounts of data can now be summarized at the touch of a button, improving business visibilityand enabling users to become more proactive in their approachto merchandising.
Robin Coles, Prologic
“Using HyperRoll’s data aggregation software, we are now able to offer substantially increased analysis capabilities to our customers. Enormous amounts of data can now be summarized at the touch of a button, improving business visibility and enabling users to become more proactive in their approach to merchandising,” said Robin Coles, business development manager of Prologic. “We anticipate wide adoption of the HyperRoll-enabled CIMS Vision solution, both within our customers’ organizations, and the market as a whole.”
The Results
By integrating HyperRoll into the CIMS Vision reporting environment, Aquascutum has dramatically improved its query performance and thus empowered analysts and decision-makers to achieve rapid business insight. For example, a weekly business key performance indicator (KPI) report that used to take 80 minutes to open and up to 30 minutes to print, now takes only 2 minutes to open and 30 seconds to print.
“If our queries take hours to run, it is very difficult to analyze our business and make strategic decisions fast enough to make a difference,” said Craig Kayes, business projects manager of Aquascutum. “Prologic and HyperRoll have allowed us to analyze our key business drivers on an ongoing basis and proactively use our data in our decision-making process. We anticipate that these improved reporting capabilities will continue to have a dramatic impact on our business.”
Such reductions in query response times are already providing benefits to multiple areas of the business. Aquascutum is now able to report in detail on every single style in its business, perform ad hoc queries, and conduct extensive “what-if” analyses to better inform a range of business decisions. The company is now able to respond to situations more quickly, while identifying issues and creating strategies to address current opportunities or threats. In addition, they are able to drill down into detail, identifying the root causes and rapidly resolving them.
This article originally appeared in the issue of .