Case Studies > GUESS? Inc. Enhances Sales and Marketing Analysis with Mobile BI on iPad

GUESS? Inc. Enhances Sales and Marketing Analysis with Mobile BI on iPad

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Country

United States

Product

MicroStrategy Mobile
RIM BlackBerry
iPad

Tech Stack

Mobile Business Intelligence
PDF Documents

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Productivity Improvements
Revenue Growth
Customer Satisfaction

Technology Category

Functional Applications - Remote Monitoring & Control Systems
Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Visualization

Applicable Industries

Apparel
Retail

Applicable Functions

Sales & Marketing
Business Operation

Use Cases

Inventory Management
Visual Quality Detection

Services

Software Design & Engineering Services
System Integration
Training

About The Customer

GUESS?, Inc. is one of the most widely recognizable apparel companies across the globe, with over 1,421 GUESS and GUESS Accessory retail stores in over 90 countries worldwide. A company known for its innovative style, GUESS continues to dress and accessorize the world with fashion-forward apparel, handbags, watches, shoes, and more.

The Challenge

At the start of 2008, the GUESS BI team wanted to support its mobile workforce by delivering timely information to their RIM BlackBerry devices. Officials at GUESS wanted to be sure that its executives and corporate directors at headquarters, and regional directors in the field were receiving critical information, regardless of their location. To this end, GUESS selected MicroStrategy to develop a mobile business intelligence initiative that delivered operational information to end users’ smartphones. Instead of receiving cumbersome Excel spreadsheets, the sales force could open up a PDF document on their BlackBerry devices, get a quick snapshot of the business, and make immediate decisions that impact sales and revenue growth. But, GUESS knew it wasn’t going to stop there, and decided to deliver that insight to the iPad.

The Solution

In 2010, GUESS chose MicroStrategy Mobile to develop an iPad app that allows its executives, designers, and merchants to analyze sales performance. The iPad app helps GUESS users perform additional analysis than they currently do via BlackBerry and MicroStrategy Web. Today, GUESS users, including executives, merchants, regional directors, visual merchandisers, buyers, and planners, have access to 13 dashboards captured in one, easy-to-use app that highlights prevalent sales trends. For example, executives at the company’s Los Angeles-based headquarters can tap on summarized information such as sales performance by region (e.g., U.S. stores vs. Canadian stores), tap and swipe on margins (e.g., Are they up or down?), see trend information, and resolve pain points. GUESS has outfitted its iPad users with multiple windows into its data: Merchant and Sales. The app allows both a high-level and detailed view of the data, depending on the user. Executives are quickly briefed about the state of the business with a few swipes and taps. They are able to view graphs and charts on the business as well as view the weekly, monthly, and yearly sales at the company level or drill down to the store level.

Operational Impact

Merchants can access the app and look at the data in multiple ways. They can see best sellers across multiple levels of detail and drill down into a specific store; view inventory or sales on a map; and look at detailed information by style, down to the size level with over four months of history.
The power of being able to walk into a meeting and have information for any style or best selling item allows merchants to be able to make quick and informed decisions based on current trends.
The merchants can analyze this information while traveling, at home, or more importantly, when visiting stores. The app allows the merchants to perform a virtual store visit before visiting the store—viewing product mix, sales penetration by category, sales trends and best sellers from total store best sellers down to very specific category levels.
They are also able to compare the sales of each style to the sales at other stores. Additionally, while at the store, they can pull up any style and view its selling history, for instance, if they are trying to compare a current selling style to a style sold in the past.
Once the apps went live, feedback was tremendous and positive, according to Yen. “I got a lot of comments like, ‘The iPad apps are stunning. Can we get more of these?’ and ‘I can’t believe how easy it is to use.’ The apps simplify everyday decisions for GUESS executives meeting in conference rooms, designers checking in on their designs, and the merchants and planners analyzing store performance.

Quantitative Benefit