The Warehouse uses QlikView to analyse sales and customer conversion trends across branches

The Warehouse Group (TW Group) has chosen QlikView to analyse sales and customer conversion trends store by store to improve performance.

“Overall, QlikView helps management to understand performance and where we can do better,” said said Kevin Rowland, business information manager, at TW Group, in a statement. “Retail is a highly competitive business and store managers like to see how they are faring compared to, say, a neighbouring store.”

The retail chain has more than 80 million records housed in a central Oracle data warehouse, and needed a flexible guided analytics system to help them more easily derive business value from their data. Daily sales reports had to be produced manually via the finance department, and team members needed a more automated system that would enhance response time and increase visibility into sales performance.

One of the initial deployments with QlikView combined data coming in from the individual store counters with hourly transaction information from the point of sale systems. In two days, the system was operating and able to show what was happening within each store in both hourly and daily increments, seven days a week.

With these reports, regional and sales managers can now analyse conversion trends ? such as the percentage of visitors who perform a transaction ? and then target conversion efforts as needed.

“Conversion analysis visualisation was perhaps the most outstanding benefit of QlikView and helps pinpoint performance store by store,” said Rowland.

TW Group also uses QlikView to perform “click and collect” analysis for when customers buy online and pick up in store.

Data from all of the relevant systems is fed into QlikView, which generates dashboards to track stock movements and collections all in one central hub. They have also implemented QlikView to produce group and board level reports to show performance by brand and by channel. This involves taking data from all of the Group companies, coming from Teradata, Oracle and multiple other SQL Server data warehouses.

Data can be a very powerful tool for retailers, but only if it is made understandable and easily accessible to the right parties,” said Sharryn Millican, vice president and regional director, Qlik Australia and New Zealand. “TW Group has taken analytics out of the back office of IT and has brought it directly onto the store floor. As a result, their team members can immediately evaluate what is going on within their stores and take proactive actions to improve performance and operations.”

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