Customers

Anna's Linens

"The enduring value we get from Business Objects lies in our new ability to communicate what is expected of our employees and most importantly, to provide the BI tools for them to execute on those goals and measure their performance."

Scott Gladstone
Chief Operating Officer
Anna's Linens

Enabling a Growing Business

Anna's Linens is facing a challenging stage in its evolution into a national retailer within the United States. Today, the retailer of home fashion and furnishings has 250 stores in 21 states and generates approximately $350 million in annual revenues. But by 2008, company executives plan to add 40 new stores across the country. They are determined to execute on their 3-year strategic plan for a successfully growth strategy.

"We are transitioning from a regional, entrepreneurial company to a national retailer, and that requires a significant investment in human resources, intellectual capital, and IT systems and processes," says Scott Gladstone, Chief Operating Officer of Anna's Linens. "We are well aware that 90 percent of mid-size companies are not successful at implementing their strategies because they don't have visibility into their business as it compares to their strategic plan. However, we are taking the approach that adopting a business intelligence solution to help us align our business with our strategic plans will help us turn our strategy into reality. With a BI solution, we can better manage and understand our operations and build a sustainable infrastructure."

Gladstone wanted to help his management team achieve the company's ambitious growth plans by providing them with a business intelligence tool they could use to map out and communicate Anna's Linens' progress by measuring performance against goals. "Anna's is a performance-based organization; however, business strategy is only as successful as our ability to measure our performance. It's the measurement that drives analysis and action. I believe it's critical that we have the ability to benchmark and measure performance so the entire organization is aligned around the strategic initiatives. These must be clearly defined goals that tie to easily understood metrics and performance indicators so we have the ability to measure and report on those initiatives in a timely manner."

Poor Understanding of the Business

Yet Anna's Linens suffered from lack of visibility into the key performance indicators that are the real drivers for this business and employees had no way of measuring the stores' profitability or performance against the company's strategic plan. Store managers, district managers, and regional directors needed actionable information to plan merchandise and inventory more effectively down to the store level. "We truly lacked the granular visibility into our business to drill down and see where our opportunities existed and to analyze what was happening at 250 locations quickly," says Gladstone.

For example, Anna's Linens is planning on implementing traffic counters in each of its stores to tie guest traffic with transactions at the till and calculate conversion rates. With this information, store managers would have a better understanding of traffic volume, a key metric for calculating staffing levels. However, the company lacked a reporting tool that could combine this data with other equally valuable metrics, like sales transactions gathered through point of sale (POS) software, and store staffing data.

Inefficient Data Access and Communications

Merchandising staffers had difficulty accessing data from the company's JDA demand and supply chain solution, so they had to build queries to analyze different data sets from the system. Even so, sales and marketing departments couldn't manipulate the data—sorting by date, or by SKU's, or by region—to identify and respond to trends. With no reliable distribution mechanism for consistent reporting across all functions and levels of the business, employees in Anna's store operations team, including 45 district managers, 4 regional directors, and close to 250 store managers, operated in isolation.

"As a COO, I have to operate from a high level and work with our store operations, merchandizing, finance, and IT teams to develop a single, global version of the truth," says Gladstone. "This is also true for setting the KPI's that we need to manage and measure daily. An important part of my role is to be the conduit for different departments to help tie all of the data that exists at Anna's Linens in meaningful ways so that with the proper BI solution our key management can make better decisions."

Anna's Linens needed to combine data in self serve reports so store managers could better understand KPIs like inventory productivity and gross margin return. And for company executives, Anna's Linens needed to present the same information in a dashboard format, so they could quickly and easily see a snapshot of the status of the business.

Approach

Anna's Linens chose BusinessObjects Edge Series as its BI platform to empower its executives and management team with actionable information. Armed with the right data, Anna's Linens employees can measure performance against strategic goals over time, ensuring that the company achieves its growth strategies

"It's our responsibility as managers to motivate our operations team," Gladstone says. "A key factor in motivating and enabling our store operations, finance, HR, logistics, and merchandizing teams to achieve our goals is to provide them with a single, cohesive reporting and business intelligence solution.

"That's where Business Objects will be a key enabler in incentivizing our employees to align around our growth initiatives," he continues. "The enduring value we get from Business Objects lies in our new ability to communicate what is expected of our employees and most importantly, to provide the BI tools for them to execute on those goals and measure their performance."

One of the key decision points for Anna's management was the solution's dashboarding functionality. "For myself, and other C-level executives, the dashboard-level reporting with the ability to drill down but also have the quick, graphical understanding of what's happening in departments is key to identifying trends or problems in the business," says Gladstone.

Anna's also chose BusinessObjects Edge Series because it is a scalable, Web-based distribution mechanism suitable for a multi-unit retailer with geographically dispersed stores and regional managers that are often on the road. It also had to be able to access data from disparate sources, including the AS400 database that powers its JDA system and the POS system and store support center systems that run on a SQL Server 2003 database in a Microsoft Windows-based environment.

Results

The management team at Anna's Linens expects its BusinessObject Edge Series BI platform will help the company make good on its growth strategies. "Business Objects coming to the midmarket with a scalable reporting tool that allows us to get more visibility into our business in a timely manner for all departments is invaluable," confirms Gladstone. "This is an easy implementation and a quick win opportunity that will work with us as we grow."

Now, Anna's Linens' operations team can use Crystal Reports to combine and analyze sales and transaction data, store traffic data, and staffing models. "This is a golden opportunity to convert raw data into meaningful business insight," explains Goldstone. "If we compare traffic statistics to transactions at the cash register, we can better understand conversion rates. If we lay that on top of staffing models, we can optimize staffing levels to save money during slower times and provide better service during busy times."

Anna's will use the automated reporting functionality within its Business Objects BI platform to propagate this information throughout the enterprise. According to Gladstone, a business strategy is also only as successful as the company's ability to communicate that strategy, another reason for choosing a BI solution to help coordinate employees' efforts in achieving strategic goals.

"One of the must-haves for us was the ability to export or distribute these reports to all store and district managers," he says. "We rely on these people to make the correct decisions, given the correct information. It's our job to not only give them that information, but to train them and lead them through that decision-making process."

Anna's Linens employees will use the Business Objects BI platform to get a quick and complete view of the important information they need to align everyday business operations with the company's strategies for growth. For executives, this means quick easy access to graphical snapshots of the company's KPIs. "I want the daily executive summary of what's happening into the business and to drill down into any issue," confirms Gladstone. "Business Objects dashboarding capabilities will allow me and other executives to understand the business in real time."

The enduring value Anna's Linens gets from its Business Objects BI solution lies in the ability for managers to communicate what is expected of their employees and to provide the BI tools for them to measure their performance as they execute on those goals. "If we can measure performance, we can reward performance," says Gladstone. "This allows us to develop an incentive program that is performance based and is aligned with the strategic initiatives of the company. Once we have the entire company executing against our strategic growth plans, we are sure of success. With Business Objects BI tools at our fingertips, Anna's Linens is in a great position to grow."

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