Clothing and jewellery retailer The Foschini Group has become one of the most successful local users of data warehousing. First it employed its data warehouse to plug gaps in its systems; now it is extending its use to fine-tune marketing campaigns. The group consists of the Foschini chain itself, and the Markhams, Sterns, American Swiss Jewellers and Pages chains. Annette Verwey, systems manager in charge of the data warehouse at Cape Town-based Foschinidata, the group`s IT company, says the data warehouse, based on the Red Brick relational database, helped the group to understand what customers were buying. Software Futures represents Red Brick in South Africa. "We`re very good at selling and we`re very good at merchandising," says Verwey. "What we haven`t been good at is understanding which customers are buying what. Our data warehouse has plugged that gap." Foschini has been running its data warehouse since June 1995. Most of the group`s core systems run on an IBM mainframe. Data from the company`s 4 million customers is downloaded to the group`s Unix server overnight and is available for querying the next morning. This data includes sales, credit information and new account applications. Users can then run complex queries against the data to find relationships. A typical example of a query to be run against the database would be to establish the buying patterns of specific customers. A user would identify a piece of merchandise and then determine the demographics of the customers who bought the stock as well as all the other purchases in their shopping basket. The data warehouse scans all purchases for a specified period, for all 4 million customers nationwide, and then returns the results inside a minute. "By running queries against the database, we established that we had some misconceptions about our customers, what they were buying and where they were buying it," Verwey says. "Initially we were moving stock from one store, where it was not selling well, to another, where the items were in demand. The individual companies in the group use the data warehouse for different purposes, says Verwey. American Swiss has used it to track the efficacy of individual marketing campaigns, such as customer previews and card-based relationship management. And in Markhams the data warehouse has become entrenched in the range, assortment and allocation planning processes. The data warehouse has also had a significant impact on Foschini stores, with the actual content of the stores changing, based on the warehouse`s reports. User reaction to the data warehouse has been enthusiastic, Verwey maintains, adding that while users were presented with a set of templates to simplify querying of the database, they are also encouraged to compile their own queries and to experiment with the data warehouse so as to find ever more obscure and esoteric links and relationships. The Red Brick data warehouse database is marketed in South Africa by Software Futures.
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