Keeping track of inventory and synching up business objectives among the various retail channels would be daunting under normal conditions, but imagine trying to do this with an outdated IT infrastructure.
Casual Male recently updated its entire systems infrastructure – everything from merchandising and POS to payroll and supply chain applications. As they were upgrading, though, Hernreich realized they had a lot of value locked up in data isolated in applications.
“We’re having trouble accessing information quickly from our various businesses,” Hernreich said. Since a spike in demand from the online side of the business, for instance, could affect the inventory available to a retail outlet, this was a serious problem. “We needed to find a way to share important information, such as the basic selling velocity for an item.”
Hernreich did what many other CIOs and COOs have done when facing a problem like this: he turned to a BI vendor. The difference, though, is that Casual Male went with a smaller vendor that customizes its BI offerings to an end user’s needs. “What you get with the bigger guys is a shrink-wrapped product, and you must conform to it. When we described our problem to Oco, they found a way to make their solution fit us.”
Tailored solution
Unlike the large BI platform providers -– Cognos, Business Objects, SAS, and Hyperion – Oco delivers its BI software as a service. Oco’s approach is to start with the basic business problem and tailor a BI solution to address it. Oco then works to integrate that with existing applications and systems, rather than handing integration off to a third party.
For Casual Male, this had nice business symmetry to it, since the company serves hard-to-fit men, specializing in big and tall clothing. Casual Male’s example also points to one of the problems plaguing BI platform implementations. They’re not always a perfect fit for the disparate needs of end users, and the decision to buy is just the beginning of a long integration process.
“The reason many customers have trouble with BI is that a vendor sells you software, but then it takes months to configure your underlying data and systems to work with it,” said George O’Conor, Oco’s CEO. “For end users, ROI is critical, but this process, which often involves multiple vendors and service providers, pushes ROI too far off into the future.”
To be fair, O’Conor conceded that the traditional BI offerings were better suited for large enterprises with significant IT staffs. IT is not one of Casual Male’s principle concerns, and they don’t want it to be.
According to Betsy Burton, vice president and distinguished analyst with Gartner, the trouble isn’t the platforms but that BI has historically been sold as a set of tactical tools. “The problem is not the technology or its implementation, but that the technology is often deployed in monolithic application silos,” Burton said.
Get on the same page
Burton suggested that people step back and reconsider what exactly BI means, viewing it holistically, rather than as a set of reporting and querying functions. In most organizations, BI was adopted in a piecemeal way. A BI tool would be bundled with an application, usually in the sales or finance departments, and as additional BI features were added, they were done so haphazardly, department by department, application by application – with little or no integration.
“The bottoms-up approach has definitely hindered the success of BI,” said Darren Cunningham, director of product marketing for Business Objects, a BI platform vendor. The answer, then, seems to be to implement BI from the top down. Have senior management define the business objectives, match those objectives to appropriate BI tools, and then have IT deploy them, right? Not necessarily.
“The top-down approach can be just as problematic,” Cunningham said. “You don’t want to have your senior managers buy a platform, throw it to IT, and then walk away. That’s equally bad. The key is to get IT and senior management speaking the same language and working to achieve the same goals.”