Fashion Forward

The tale of Grotto S.p.A. is a rare success story in the apparel industry as it evolved from a single store in the early 1990s into one of the premier global fashion brands. Almost five decades ago, Founder and President Claudio Grotto built a textile lab at age 21 before proceeding to manage a family-owned store in the 1960s. These experiences instilled in him a desire to own and operate a clothing company -- from handling and processing raw materials to selling the final product. He followed this dream and today manufactures and distributes GAS Jeans brand clothing throughout more than 3,500 retail stores located in such fashion forward cities as London, Cairo, Tokyo, Cologne, Singapore and Kuwait City, among others.

Growing pains

When Grotto decided to enter the design, manufacturing and distribution industries, he understood managing an extensive sales network would be challenging. Additional challenges included managing a dynamic inventory and supply chain network as well as forecasting and responding to emerging trends in the rapidly changing fashion industry.

The company required a business analysis solution that could analyze global retail data and allow any employee to interactively access and analyze sales, customer, product and store data.

"Previously there was no integrated and 'user-oriented' system for data analysis," says Carlo Pase, IT Manager, Grotto S.p.A. "We did have individual applications that were used exclusively by the information systems department. We would build queries to respond to specific requests from business users."

The company selected QlikTech's QlikView as its business intelligence infrastructure to better organize the company's data and ensure that all administrative offices could share the same information. Specifically, Grotto is using the QlikView Developer version to internally build analysis models. For publication to the different users, Grotto uses the QlikView portal so that individual users can access and analyze data directly through the Internet.

"We chose QlikView for its flexibility in managing data and the independence guaranteed to the user, compared to the traditional relational-type 'data warehouse'," says Pase.

QlikTech's flagship product, QlikView 7.2, enables instant, in-memory manipulation of massive data sets on low-cost hardware, allowing affordable widespread deployment of analytic applications in days. According to Aberdeen Group, by rethinking business intelligence's standard underpinnings -- emphasizing data pre-association rather than pre-structuring, and leveraging fast, inexpensive memory rather than slower disk -- QlikTech responds to a demand for diverse views of data.

Grotto implemented QlikView between 2004 and 2005 over the course of only a few weeks. Pase reports that the deployment process was straightforward and problem-free. Grotto only needed to work with QlikTech consultants to help organize and structure the databases, however, Grotto autonomously developed the applications.

Buttoned-Up Analysis

Now up and running, QlikView allows any Grotto employee to interactively access and analyze sales, customer, product and store data on the fly, which helps them do their jobs faster and more effectively. Today there are approximately 50 people inside Grotto who are utilizing QlikView on a daily basis for commercial, retail and management tasks. That number is expected to double within a few months once Grotto completes some additional training.

Already, Grotto can see business value growing quickly as it develops, modifies, deploys and uses business intelligence applications to analyze and extend the company's sales networks.

"QlikView empowers our employees with access to the information they need to do their jobs better. Together we are working to build Gas into one of the leading Italian brands world-wide, and QlikTech is helping us to achieve that goal."