House of Fraser taps into MicroStrategy platform
House of Fraser has rolled out MicroStrategy 10 as it looks to accelerate decision making across the organisation and improve the in-store customer experience.
“By empowering people across the business with visualisation tools, MicroStrategy is enabling us to transform our business culture. Our teams easily understand what the visualisations reveal to us about the state of our business and can apply that to the day to day as well as to the strategic choices we make,” says Julian Burnett, CIO and Executive Director, House of Fraser. “MicroStrategy has enabled us to achieve a much clearer picture of the entire business and an understanding, for example, of the dynamics between people and space. By visualising data from IoT and other sources, we can optimise these dimensions, improve the customer journey and ultimately drive growth.”
Prior to 2017, House of Fraser’s analytics was restricted to large volumes of grid reports that were often printed and physically brought to meetings. In addition to the sizable printing costs, this approach frequently resulted in wasted time and conflicting data. Furthermore, the BI team would spend considerable time validating data and gathering business requirements in order to build a single dashboard. As part of the retailer’s business transformation strategy, it chose to streamline its analytics environment and make greater use of visualisations in order to provide users with actionable insights. House of Fraser introduced nGenBI, its analytics initiative, and rolled out the first in a series of interactive dashboards on MicroStrategy 10 aimed at transforming the way employees interact with and consume data. The BI team has subsequently rolled out pixel-perfect documents, self-service data discovery, advanced analytics, mobile reporting, and MicroStrategy Office to its user community.
“Using MicroStrategy’s platform, our employees can pull together a data set, apply it to a data model and visualise it all within minutes,” says Steve Limbirons, Business Intelligence Programme Manager, House of Fraser. “That is a huge step forward for us. Self-service data discovery enables our business users, regardless of their technical skill or role, to take analytics into their own hands and quickly answer complex business questions on-the-fly.”
House of Fraser also plans to roll-out the latest MicroStrategy 10.9 features, leverage the R analytics bundle, and expand its use of mobile analytics.
