INTELLIGENTRETAILER
29
US RETAILER CLAIMS
FIRST GO-LIVE FOR
NEW BI PRODUCT
H
arbor Freight Tools, a California-based multichannel tools
and general merchandise retailer, has this month gone into
production with new business intelligence (BI) and data
warehousing tools.
The multichannel retailer with 350 stores, covering 40 states and a
substantial catalogue and internet business has selected Retail Express’s
AMP2 Pricing and Promotions product and, with it the recently released
AMP2 Data Marts and BI layer powered by MicroStrategy.
It is the ½ rst to implement Retail Express’ Intelligent Merchandising
application, AMP2, which combines the planning, evaluation, management
and execution of pricing, promotions, customer offers and advertising. It
also builds all print and digital advertising vehicles including ¾ yers, posters
and store signs, as well as building elasticity demand models to support
the application and provide smart, non-linear forecasting, simulation,
impact analysis and optimisation.
Retail Express has now also added the full MicroStrategy BI business
intelligence engine and technology under the covers of AMP2, to provide
application-speci½ c intelligence for the retail application.
The application has been pre-de½ ned to work out of the box with
powerful insights, analysis, grid and graphical reporting, dashboards and
management summary packs while, at the same time, providing Harbor
Freight with speci½ c reporting aids in real time – all within the AMP2
application. It also has the ability to add further BI reports and analysis on
the back of AMP2.
Retail Express has built several subject speci½ c data marts to provide
¾ exibility for users with historical and current application data covered
in a format that can be readily used by the business intelligence engine.
The data has retail-speci½ c referential data and Retail Express has built the
meta-data, BI insights and reports to support the requirements of expert
users. And MicroStrategy’s BI engine supports numerous report forms,
including web-based reports and in-line application insights and reports.
As well as email reports and real-time dashboards, the power users will
be able to employ with cubes and online analytical processing (OLAP)
capabilities.
The data marts consist of data from multiple sources, transformed into
a structured information environment, with atomic and aggregated data
for high performance reporting and analysis, designed to answer speci½ c
questions for a speci½ c set of users from data drawn from the clients
enterprise and current application data.
Harbor Freight will use the BI tools to replace numerous Microsoft
Access and Excel-based reporting and analysis processes. The
retailer is looking to radically extend its current insights with this ½ rst
implementation of the latest Retail Express suite.
NOVEMBER 2008 RETAIL TECHNOLOGY
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