Beaverbrooks the Jewellers has been selling high-quality jewellery on the UK high street since 1919.  There are currently 60 Beaverbrooks branches nationwide, in addition to a thriving mail order and
e-commerce business.

Beaverbrooks prides itself on offering not only fine jewellery, but a high-quality customer experience too; therefore, it is essential that key, reliable, up-to-date information is available to members of staff throughout the organisation.

When Beaverbrooks took the decision to revamp its BI solutions, it turned to Infodepth for advice and assistance. Infodepth's solutions are based solely on Microsoft technologies, in particular SQL Server 2005, Microsoft Office and ProClarity.

Patrick Walker, head of MIS at Beavbrooks explains: "Having seen the quality of the Infodepth solution, we were confident that they were the people to move forward with. Infodepth's use of Microsoft products was a perfect fit with our vision of an enhanced, integrated information flow throughout the company."

The issues that Beaverbrooks faced mainly revolved around its need to provide more relevant information to the branches and head office staff in a timelier manner. In addition, the information provided needed to be available at the lowest level of detail for those members of staff who required the most in-depth analysis. The final requirement was that the reporting and analysis tools should be easy to use and deploy.

Beaverbrooks' incumbent solution was heavily paper-based, time-consuming and overly complex to operate and because reports were only produced for branches on a weekly basis, the usefulness of the information provided diminished as the week progressed.

The solution provided by Infodepth began with a new data warehouse. This resided on a SQL Server 2005 database. SQL Server Integration Services (SISS) was used to extract data from the various disparate sources (EPOS till logs, merchandising and warehousing systems were the initial data providers). SISS was then used to check and cleanse the data before populating the data warehouse tables. It was decided that a nightly feed was sufficient to meet the company's needs.

Once the data warehouse had been populated, a number of SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) cubes were designed. These cubes provided the main interface between the users and the information and were also populated overnight. Now that the data was being captured each night and presented for analysis via the cubes, a decision had to be made on how Beaverbrooks' personnel, with their varying requirements, would access the information.

Phil Chesterton, MD of Infodepth explains: "We were faced with a scale of complexity when we looked at the reporting needs of the personnel. Some had basic needs, whereby they only needed to view a static report to obtain the information they required (for example, a branch looking at their top 20 selling lines). Others had the need to interact with the information to break down top-level figures (as an example, an area manager looking at performance v last year, then understanding which branches, or product areas were under or over performing). The final group needed the ability to analyse the information to the nth degree and break down to the lowest possible level of detail when required. By portfolio to our experience in retail BI, we were able to achieve this and more."

The overall project took ten weeks to complete, the majority of which was Infodepth development.  Chesterton explains: "Our BI project model dictates that we only require resource from the client at the beginning (to agree the content, design and data sources) and the end of the project (to test reports and queries and to validate figures). For the remainder of the time, the client's personnel are free to concentrate on their normal daily activities, without interruption from us."

The resulting system comprises the central data warehouse residing on SQL Server 2005 with its overnight feeds from EPOS, merchandising and warehousing, plus overnight builds of a number of SSAS cubes.  These cubes can then be analysed in a number of ways by Beaverbrooks' personnel.

Walker explains: "Each branch has an ADSL line that they use to link to the central reporting portal. The tight security ensures that upon logging in, they are only shown information that is relevant to their branch."

The impact that the introduction of the Infodepth solution has had at Beaverbrooks is significant. Personnel based at head office can gain a detailed insight into the performance of the business easily and quickly by the use of the familiar Excel interface, or by the powerful ProClarity toolset. Management dashboards can also be built to provide them with a single screen overview of their key performance indicators (KPIs).

Branches can now view key information on-demand from the Reporting Services portal, enabling them to be far more responsive to their own performance and that of the business in general.

Walker concludes: "The introduction of the Infodepth solution has opened up new opportunities for us to control and measure the performance of the business. Branches can now access key information on demand and colleagues throughout the organisation have easy-to-use tools and reports of their fingertips. The ability to provide information in this way is a key part of our strategy to empower our store teams, enabling them to reduce costs, increase sales and, most importantly, provide the best possible level of customer service.

"Beaverbrooks is realising the benefit of delivering key business information to the people who need it, when they need it, enabling faster analysis and more effective and strategic decision making, both in the boardroom and throughout the business," says David Hobbs-Mallyon, applications platform product and solutions manager, Microsoft. "Using Microsoft BI technology infrastructure helps to deliver a tightly integrated solution that is rapid to develop, simple to deploy and easy to manage. Much of the information can be accessed via familiar Office tools, which also reduces training costs and speeds up user adoption".