Customer Solution Case Study
/ Global Fashion Leader Benefits from Deeper Business Insight with Data Management Software
“With SQL Server 2012, users can analyze all the data they need to make decisions and confidently identify areas for growth. It gives us all the information needed to successfully run the business.”
Jeff Lombardi, Group Vice President Merchandise Systems, PVH
In the fast-moving fashion market, PVH, the company behind brands such as Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, needed to gain deeper insight into its day-to-day operations. Through a single data warehouse based on Microsoft SQL Server 2012, managers are now able to quickly analyze large volumes of data using Microsoft Excel 2010, giving them the confidence to make business-critical decisions and embrace new opportunities.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published December 2013
Business Needs
With iconic brands such as Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Van Heusen, and IZOD, PVH has grown to be one of the world’s largest fashion companies, creating, producing, and selling clothes around the globe. To succeed in this fast-moving industry, responding to changing trends and buying patterns is vital. Being able to track sales and stock levels across multiple time periods and down to individual garment sizes is central to making business-critical decisions on a daily basis.
PVH’s retail merchandising systems were creating a huge volume of data, but their built-in reporting was unable to deliver the level of granularity needed by the
organization. To fill this knowledge gap and respond to constant user requests, the 15-member Merchandising Systems IT team had to create bespoke reports on an ad-hoc basis. This was inefficient in two ways; reports took time to generate, risking lost opportunities, and skilled IT staff were prevented from working on other, longer-term projects.
“In our market, merchandising managers need to have a close understanding of our operations in order to make critical business decisions on a daily basis,” says Jeff Lombardi, Group Vice President Merchandise Systems, PVH. “While we had vast volumes of data from our operations, it was taking too long to extract value
using our existing tools and was impacting IT productivity. We needed a solution that let us analyze data down to a granular level to spot market opportunities, was simple to use, and could cope with the volume, variety, and velocity of our data.”
Solution
To deliver the accessible insights that the business required, PVH knew that it needed to centralize information from multiple systems into a data warehouse and make it available to all 200 users in the Merchandising Groups through easy-to-use tools. After extensive market research, PVH chose to work with Infodepth, a Microsoft partner with Gold competency in Business Intelligence, due to its skills and market understanding. A specialist in data warehousing and business intelligence solutions for the retail and leisure sectors, Infodepth recommended a solution based on Microsoft SQL Server 2012 data management softwareand Microsoft Excel 2010 spreadsheet software.
“Moving to Microsoft SQL Server was very appealing as it provided us with future-proofed performance. We’re adding nearly 10 million new entries to our data warehouse every day so we required a powerful, fast, scalable, and simple-to-manage platform. SQL Server 2012 ticks all the boxes. Excel is already a common language for our users, meaning they could create their own reports from day one with no IT involvement, which made it the perfect choice for the front end of our solution,” says Lombardi.
The project began in April 2012, with 3.5 terabytes of data covering sales, transactions, and stock ledger information from 16 separate systems integrated into the data warehouse.
“The project has been a real testament to the strengths of Microsoft technology. The data warehouse worked strongly from day one, delivering blistering fast performance, and it scales effortlessly to handle PVH’s huge datasets, giving users unparalleled business insight,” says Phil Chesterton, Product Development Director, Infodepth.
With the success of the data warehouse in North America, PVH is rolling out the concept to its Asia-Pacific operations, again working with Infodepth. The regional version will provide 200 users in Hong Kong, Korea, and China with access to the same granular level of detail as their US colleagues.
Benefits
PVH’s new solution enables its managers to analyze precise information quickly and easily, deepening their understanding of the business and consequently driving more informed decisions. Since the system went fully live in January 2013, PVH has seen the following major benefits.
- Better insights. Users now have access to a wealth of detailed information that was previously unavailable to them. The ability to analyze granular data, down to the size and color of individual garments, delivers better inventory management,thereby reducing overall stock costsand making it easier to spot new opportunities, yielding additional sales growth.
- Complete, easy-to-manage platform. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and Excel 2010 are designed to work well together, so PVH’s platform is seamlessly integrated, reducing management time and cost. As users can quickly generate their own reports, the IT team savesone day per week and is now able to focus on supporting the business in other areas. With staff already highly skilled in using Excel, PVH has not needed to invest in licensing a new reporting tool, and training time has been minimized, leading to annual software cost savings of approximately US$300,000.
- Faster performance. While the information within the very large data warehouse is highly complex, day-to-day performance is extremely fast. Users are able to run multiple reports at the same time, reducing the time to find information from 40 minutes to just 2 in some cases.
“Before, we had a blended, top-line picture of operations. Now, with SQL Server 2012, users can analyze all the data they need to make decisions and confidently identify areas for growth. It gives us all the information needed to successfully run the business,” says Lombardi.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published December 2013