In this section, we will look at a small example and try to relate it with what was explained in the earlier sections. The names are not real but the scenarios will be real. We will look at an example of a retail chain.

AB Fashions LLC has approached you to get benefits from implementation of a BI project.

First step is to go through the website of AB Fashion LLC and get to know more about the company. Looking at the website, the following observations were captured:

• AB Fashions LLC is headquartered in London and has operations across multiple countries covering Europe, Asia, Latam, and Americas
• AB Fashions LLC is a fashion retail chain and caters to clothing and accessories for men, women, and children
• AB Fashions LLC is a B2C company and has an omnichannel model
• AB Fashions LLC is a large format retail with presence in premium malls, and also has an e-commerce website selling directly to customers
• AB Fashions LLC procures apparel from leading designers and sells them via both online and retail stores
• AB Fashions LLC is active on social media and is always on the look out for newer ways to connect with their audience
• Their turnover is 200 million USD

It's also important to understand the objectives and goals of AB Fashions LLC. An initial ground work can be done by finding out about the key people in management and then following interviews given by them, visiting their Twitter handle, and also trying to get some more information from Linkedin regarding their past experiences.

Eric is the CEO of AB Fashions LLC. Eric is also the founder of the company and is well known in the industry. He is technology savvy and not averse to takings risks. A bit of research on him gives us more idea about what his plans are and the direction he is looking at for AB Fashions LLC:

• Eric is looking at expanding from 70 stores to 100 stores in the next 2 years
• Eric is wanting to improve the sluggish growth rate and is looking at revenue of 250 million USD for the financial year
• Improving store profitability and improving efficiency are other areas which Eric wants to focus on
• Eric wants to understand the customers better and wants AB Fashions LLC to be able to cater to them in a much better way
• Eric wants to spend more on marketing this year and have clients of AB Fashions LLC to have a greater recall value and improve customer loyalty

Lisa is the CFO of AB Fashions LLC. She's been with the company for more than three years. After studying her interviews and reading her tweets, the following points have come to the fore:

• Lisa is concerned about improving the profitability of the company.
• Considering Eric's plan for expansion, Lisa wants to focus on budgeting and having a good working capital. The expenditures in store openings and in increasing head counts have to be planned, and she wants a better visibility into expenses and wants to cut down on unwanted costs.
• She wants the employees to be better informed, even at the store level.

An initial study of the company can help us know so many things. This study has helped us get insights into the nature of the company, its business, and its vision.

Looking at the directions given by Eric and Lisa, you can start planning on how as consultant you can help them achieve their goals, and start thinking of the value adds.

You can also start gathering some initial inputs to help you understand the current systems in place. After a brief initial conversation with the CIO, Rob, we could get the following inputs:

• AB Fashions LLC has SAP ECC 6 as their ERP. The point of sales(pos) data and the eCommerce data are captured in SAP.
• AB Fashions LLC has built a Data-Warehouse (DW) on SAP and is using Business Objects at their front end.
• Rob and his team end up spending a lot of time when a user requests changes in reports. There are cubes built on DW and changing these(cubes) takes considerable time. A lot of times they have to take external help.
• Over time the performance of the reporting tool has slowed down and the reports now take considerable time to open.
• Of late, the users have started asking Rob and his team for data exports in excel.
• Rob is keen to have a lot of current work offloaded to the business users.
• Rob also mentioned that the users are keen to get data from social media.

You now have good information about the existing systems and have understood some of the challenges. Next would be to get some more information from Eric and Lisa. To make it more interactive, we will try to present this in the form of a conversation (role-play):

You (Jay): Good Morning Eric. It's a pleasure to meet you. I was going through your various interviews and admire your vision for taking AB Fashions to the next level. As I understand, you are keen to increase the number of stores, increase the revenue, and provide a better experience to your clients. I would like to hear more on this vision from you.

Eric: Good morning Jay. What you mentioned is right. We have big plans. One of the aspects we are trying to improve upon is making our brand stronger. We are investing more in our marketing efforts this year. We would like the BI software to help us in improving our sales. I would like to quickly understand which are my most profitable products across regions and for what time periods. Currently, crunching this is taking considerable time. I would also like to get more information about store profitability, optimizing store operations, and improving footfall. I will be happy to understand the breakup of my sales based on seasons and weekdays/weekends. I want to better understand my customers and want to do a detailed SKU level of analysis and understand user preferences.

You: Thanks Eric. Just want to understand from you how you are doing omni-channel analytics and would it help if we can also help you understand what your customers are saying about you on social media?

Eric: We, for now, are finding it difficult to consolidate sales from different channels. If you can provide us an easy way, it will help us to up-sell and cross-sell, and also give a better experience to our clients. Social media is important to us, but for now we have to depend on an external agency for this input.

You: Great! This can be achieved very easily in Qlik. We can help you to get data from your various channels in a single dashboard and help you easily look at performance across the channels. You can also target customers through the most effective channels. What more are you expecting from the BI solution?

Eric: I would want to analyze my sales trends and compare them month on month, quarter on quarter, year on year. I want to measure performance against targets at all levels (product category wise, product wise, store wise, and region wise). Managing returns is an important area. I want to understand which products have high returns. This will help me to decide whether to continue with the product or not. I also want to understand how my campaigns are performing and the ROI for each of them.

You: Eric, you had mentioned setting up new stores and also improving the customer experience.

Eric: Yes, that's right.

You: We can help you make better decisions on store opening. We can help you with demographic details of a location, along with the spending power of the region, and also help you understand the age wise makeup of the population there. This will help you identify your target area easily and help you plan future stores.

Eric: That will be great!

You: Thanks Eric. This was helpful. Who in your team will help me get detailed information on the KPI you mentioned?

Eric: Please get in touch with Mark, our VP-sales.

You: Thanks Eric for the insights. Will interact with Mark to get more details. Have a great day!

A quick conversation will thus help you understand the broad level of expectation. This information will help you build a brief project document. This document can then be shared with Mark and a detailed requirement gathering can be taken up. We see how Jay could bring in value-add mentioning bringing in external data to make better business decisions. Jay could also have talked about Geo Analytics. This would have helped them understand how people from different areas are shopping, which of the stores they are going to, how much time does it take for them to reach a store, and how much of nearby the population is each store catering to.

Similar exercises can also be carried out with the CFO, Lisa. Like with Eric, try to bring in value-adds which can help them in their business. Some of other functions which this exercise can be carried out on are merchandising and inventory management. Store operations is another function for which a separate Qlik dashboard can be developed.