The Foschini Group: Accelerating Retail Analytics with Pyramid
The Foschini Group, a South African retail conglomerate with over 4,000 outlets and complex multi-vendor systems, accelerated and unified its analytics by adopting Pyramid 2020, which enabled faster reporting, integrated diverse data sets from merchandise, financials, eCommerce, and manufacturing into a single platform, and handled massive daily data volumes with a familiar interface requiring minimal training.
Key Figures
- Single Platform View: Shared data aggregated for multiple users
- Faster Reporting: Time to insights accelerated across the business
- Familiar Interface: Minimal training required for easy-to-use tools
- Future-Proof Analytics: Platform works with hybrid IT systems
The Challenge
Headquartered in Cape Town, South Africa, The Foschini Group (TFG) is a diverse group with a portfolio of 29 leading fashion retail brands across various lifestyle and merchandise categories. They offer clothing, jewelry, cell phones, accessories, cosmetics, sporting and outdoor apparel and equipment, and homeware and furniture, spanning value to upper market segments through more than 4,083 outlets in 32 countries. The firm has grown rapidly through acquisition, resulting in complex back-office systems.
Analytics were previously run across different systems, including Pyramid’s BI Office (an earlier Pyramid version). The Senior Department Manager in charge of BI Projects recognized that a single platform approach would best address the scale and complexity of the business's data.
“We process around 20 million records daily just for our stock on-hand inventory, which was too much for previous BI Tools to handle. Pyramid was significantly faster than anything else out there. It integrated easily with Analysis Services cubes and is great at bringing different data sets together.”
Pyramid 2020 treats multiple data sets as a single shared resource, providing an aggregated view into everything from a single stock-keeping unit to margins and profitability. This led to its selection as the preferred analytics platform within the organization.
The Solution
Pyramid was chosen to provide a single view of data from four business streams: merchandise management, financials, eCommerce, and manufacturing. Each stream has its own systems and applications, both on and off-premises, using a range of vendors including Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services.
The IT Manager wanted to avoid moving data and instead leverage Pyramid for a more holistic architecture—a universal platform delivering more relevant data to users more quickly. Pyramid’s intuitive interface supported this goal:
“People don’t need three days of training as you do with other BI products. If you work in Excel, you can use Pyramid, that’s the bottom line.”
Publishing financial reports is a key focus for the analytics teams. Insightful reporting for buyers and planners runs over 60 pages and covers sales, profit, stock holding, and margin. Executives use this information to inform business strategy at monthly board meetings.
There are plans to build dashboards for real-time reporting with elements of self-service, though the IT Manager emphasizes the importance of curated and trusted data:
“If you don’t make sure the data is curated and trusted, self-service BI can be very bad. Pyramid has helped with best practice.”
Benefits
Integrating Pyramid with TFG’s multiple systems and data sources has delivered significant benefits:
- The merchandise procurement team reduced report compilation time from three-and-a-half days to 10 minutes.
- Manufacturing reduced data analysis time from a week (using Excel) to an hour.
- A user in one business area now spends five minutes producing a report for a Monday morning meeting that previously took hours.
The time saved is now used more productively to analyze data for insights. The ability to combine and analyze multiple data sets was not possible with previous BI tools. Additionally, data integrity and consistency have improved, and insights are delivered much faster.
The Finance community benefits from a consolidated report each morning that integrates different data sets for analyzing turnover, margins, and conversion rates. The immediacy of this information leads to faster and more informed strategic decision-making.
Currently, most reports focus on the company’s trading position, but there are plans to innovate with Pyramid in areas like inventory analysis.
TFG, like many companies operating across hybrid cloud and on-premise IT, finds Pyramid a powerful platform for overlaying disparate data sets with centralized analytics:
“We’re giving our people quicker access to consistent data that we leave in one place rather than move around. It’s a universal platform for everyone.”
People don’t need three days training like you need with other BI products. If you work in Excel, you can use Pyramid, that’s the bottom line.
– Senior Department Manager of Business Intelligence Projects, TFG