Case Studies > House of Fraser Transforms Analytics with MicroStrategy's nGenBI Program

House of Fraser Transforms Analytics with MicroStrategy's nGenBI Program

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

Europe

Country

United Kingdom
Ireland

Product

MicroStrategy
MicroStrategy Office
R Analytics bundle

Tech Stack

Interactive Dashboards
Self-Service Data Discovery
Advanced Analytics
Mobile Reporting

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Productivity Improvements
Cost Savings
Customer Satisfaction
Digital Expertise

Technology Category

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

Applicable Industries

Retail

Applicable Functions

Business Operation
Sales & Marketing
Warehouse & Inventory Management

Use Cases

Predictive Maintenance

Services

System Integration
Data Science Services
Software Design & Engineering Services

About The Customer

House of Fraser is a British department store group with over 60 stores across the UK and Ireland. Founded in Glasgow in 1849, the company has grown steadily into one of the UK’s biggest retailers, with revenues of over £1.3 billion and a workforce of more than 5,000 employees. House of Fraser sells everything you need to make a house a home, from clothes to fill your closets to décor to outfit your flat. The company has relied on MicroStrategy as their system of record for enterprise reporting since 2013. The company had a large, complex reporting environment that required running more than 18,000 reports on a daily basis. By and large, they relied on simple grid reports for data analysis—fostering a corporate culture around data that can best be characterized as “retail is detail.”

The Challenge

House of Fraser had a large, complex reporting environment that required running more than 18,000 reports daily. The company relied heavily on simple grid reports for data analysis, which often resulted in wasted time, printing costs, and inaccurate or conflicting data. The nGenBI initiative aimed to simplify, visualize, and modernize their analytics environment to provide users with actionable insights. Prior to 2017, analytics at House of Fraser was restricted to large volumes of grid reports that were often printed and physically brought to meetings. This approach frequently resulted in wasted time and inaccurate or conflicting data. The nGenBI initiative sought to bring House of Fraser’s BI and analytics efforts into the 21st century. Their goal was to simplify their environment, make greater use of visualizations for analysis, and modernize their approach to analytics in order to provide users with actionable insight.

The Solution

In January 2017, the BI team at House of Fraser kicked off the nGenBI initiative by launching the first in a series of high-end interactive dashboards, aimed at transforming the way employees interact with and consume data. Their aim was to roll out the full functionality of the MicroStrategy platform over the course of 2017, including pixel-perfect documents, self-service data discovery, advanced analytics, mobile reporting, and MicroStrategy Office. Through nGenBI, House of Fraser has been able to vastly simplify their analytics environment, reducing the total number of reports in their repository from 19,450 to 10,000 (a reduction of 48.59%). This simplification has enabled the BI team to place their focus on higher-value reports and eliminate redundant reports that previously resulted in performance bottlenecks. The nGenBI initiative has completely changed the way that employees at House of Fraser consume and interact with data. Self-service data discovery enables House of Fraser’s advanced business users to take analytics into their own hands—quickly answering complex business questions by building on-the-fly reports and dashboards. Before the rollout of nGenBI, the BI team would spend weeks, or even months, acquiring and validating data and gathering business requirements in order to build a single dashboard. Today, they can use MicroStrategy data discovery tools to build user-friendly, interactive dashboards in as little as 20 minutes — completely changing the way that dashboards are designed, built, and used across the organization.

Operational Impact

House of Fraser has been able to modernize their BI environment, expanding their community of users into the hundreds and leveraging data science techniques to deliver tangible value to the business.
They can now visualize real-time customer flow data to see how customers physically move through their stores—a critical tool for improving the in-store customer experience.
House of Fraser has also been able to modernize the way that they leverage analytics in business presentations. By using MicroStrategy Office, the operations team has been able to greatly reduce the time required to produce their weekly reports (in some cases up to 60%).
The nGenBI initiative has enabled House of Fraser to simplify their analytics environment, reducing the total number of reports in their repository from 19,450 to 10,000.
Self-service data discovery enables House of Fraser’s advanced business users to take analytics into their own hands—quickly answering complex business questions by building on-the-fly reports and dashboards.

Quantitative Benefit