Bon Marche implementation of Infodepth

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: Bon Marche implementation of Infodepth.

Infodepths people have a wealth of knowledge in the retail BI arena, with over ten years experience in the design and implementation of solutions for many well-known high street retail chains.

Background
Established in 1982, Bon Marche part of The Peacock Group - is one of the UKs leading high street ladies fashion retailers with over 380 branches.

Infodepth specialises in providing BI solutions for the retail industry. Infodepths people have a wealth of knowledge in the retail BI arena, with over ten years experience in the design and implementation of solutions for many well-known high street retail chains.

Infodepths solutions are based solely on Microsoft technologies, in particular SQL Server 2005 and 2008 and Microsoft Office.

For a number of years Bon Marche had used an Oracle-based data warehouse to store transactional data. Analysis of this data was provided via a suite of Business Objects reports.
As the business expanded, this legacy system began to struggle to provide the reliability and responsiveness that the key personnel at Bon Marche required and the need for an alternative solution became a priority.

The Project
A project was initiated to source a replacement BI system for the Company. Dean Fearnsides, IT Manager at Bon Marche explains, We needed a BI / data warehousing solution that gave us improved response times, was robust and reliable, utilised modern technologies and gave us a low-cost alternative to Business Objects for our ever-increasing base of colleagues requiring reports from the system. We also wanted to take advantage of the increased performance of the new system as soon as possible and with minimal disturbance to our existing user base.

Dean and his team held discussions with a number of BI vendors over a 6-month period, culminating in a shortlist of two companies who were invited to draw up proposals covering technologies, approach and costings.

The proposal from Infodepth showed that they clearly understood our requirements and how to achieve them, says Fearnsides, their practical approach combined with a very realistic cost model made the final selection easy.

The Solution
The data warehouse solution that Infodepth supplied to Bon Marche incorporates all of the transactional data elements that the legacy system held, together with a significant number of new data items that had not previously been available for in-depth analysis.

The database selected was SQL Server 2005, utilising integration services (SSIS) for data loading and verification, analysis services (SSAS) to provide OLAP technology and reporting services (SSRS) to provide web-based reporting throughout the company.

In addition to the above, OLAP cubes provide the option of interactive analysis of data via Microsoft Excel and key users are able to build their own reports using Report Builder.

Fearnsides explains, With our previous BI system, we had a limited number of report producers due to the relatively high cost of Business Objects licences. With the Infodepth solution, however,
any Excel user can be given the authority to access the OLAP cubes at no extra cost. When this is allied to the power of using Report Builder and BI development studio, we have a very powerful solution with a very low cost per user.

Summary
Bon Marches vision was to have a BI solution that would be fast and reliable, utilising the latest Microsoft technologies and this has been brought to reality by Infodepth.

There is now more low-level transactional data being loaded into Bon Marches SQL Server data warehouse than there ever was under the older Oracle-based solution and the overall load time is much faster.

Report production is far more flexible and cost-effective than before and Fearnsides colleagues have been impressed by the speed of response. Within three months of the project kick-off, we were running existing reports in a fraction of the time they used to run on the previous system.  Six weeks further on, the new data and reporting facilities were available allowing us to move forward seamlessly without drama or disruption.

Most importantly, the project has been delivered on time, and within budget. Working with Infodepth has been an easy and enjoyable experience Fearnsides concludes.