Analyzing Store Performance with BI

By Christina Zarrello
Nearly 30 years ago, a small surf shop opened its doors in Newport Beach, California.  As teens around the country tuned into fashions inspired by the Southern California lifestyle, PacSun's business exploded and today has transformed into more than 900 stores. The chain offers top names in teen fashion, selling private-label and national brands including Hurley, Billabong, Fox, Volvom, Vurt, Roxy and Quiksilver.

To achieve long-term growth, in 2006, PacSun searched for an enterprise business intelligence (BI) solution that had the ability to consolidate its corporate data into a cohesive structure. The goal was for executives to be able to access strategic information each day and then perform timely analysis of business trends and key metrics without significantly increasing IT staff or replacing legacy systems.

The retailer selected Micro-Strategy as its business intelligence standard and QuantiSense for its retail-specific BI capabilities.  Netezza was chosen as the high-performance BI hardware platform. 

The result, according to Steve Rosenberg, vice president of information technology for PacSun, is that the solution has enabled the company to deliver time-sensitive business performance metrics to a broad audience, while also enabling it to analyze performance and take action to drive results.

"With the ability to access sales information by style, color, size, store, date and time of transaction along with other key product and location attributes, our associates no longer have to sift through volumes of reports to find information," says Rosenberg.

PacSun's enterprise dashboard reporting application now provides a single channel of company-wide business reporting and analysis and a holistic view of all corporate data. Users can view information by division, department, product attributes and location, at any time. For example, a buyer is able to look at all the hot-selling items and quickly get in touch with the vendor to speed up an order, resulting in fewer out-of-stocks and increased sales.

Users also are now able to produce highly productive and detailed seasonal re-caps. With MicroStrategy, business users independently access detailed information to analyze business performance and make better decisions in merchandising, planning and allocation, store operations and store management. 

BI for the Future
Use of pre-built models has significantly reduced the typical data warehouse implementation timeframe. Within six months of implementation, PacSun's data warehouse was populated with three years of history, and provided more than 1,000 different retail metrics and 300 standard reports.