Zavvi Business Intelligence

Zavvi Entertainment group, which bought out Virgin Retail and the Virgin Megastores chain, uses business intelligence to drive real-time sales information to their 126 rebranded stores – to directly impact revenue.

Before the management buy-out and branding change over, Zavvi went through a series of changes to improve inefficient business processes that led to poor decision making. The project was not a technology driven assignment but a key operational overhaul. The foundation for the project was the need to analyse and gain insight from information to identify weaknesses in business processes.

The initial programme focused attention on:

• Improving in-store offers
• Trading more effectively with suppliers
• Raising the standard in all areas of reporting for management

Delivering Business Strategy

For Tony Johnson, IT director at Zavvi Entertainment Group, faster access to relevant information has a definite business benefit. “We were able to conceive and deliver an enterprise-wide business intelligence platform that meets our key objectives,” says Johnson. “The project structure we created integrated seamlessly into our business processes and work culture.”

“We now have an executive suite of reports that is produced to the board and the wider executive team on a weekly basis which really drives ‘one version of the truth’. Previously, people would come to meetings with different reports telling them different things and sometimes telling the version of the truth that they wanted to present, whereas now there’s a standard set of reporting that has delivered all of our key performance indicators and gives everyone a common view of the business performance.

“In addition, we’ve also empowered certain users (that we would term ‘power users’) within our business to have access to some of the more powerful elements of the business intelligence platform so that they are able to do their own in-depth analysis and drive their own reporting. A large part of it has been about empowering those users to have far less dependency on IT. This has reduced IT workloads and our analysts now have more time to develop, redesign and reconfigure systems instead of simply responding to business user requests.”

The Right Platform

As part of its ongoing programme, Zavvi analyse inventory management, assortment planning, sales margin analysis and have brought customer footfall analysis in-house to monitor conversion rate and average transaction value – all under their enterprise-wide business intelligence (BI) platform from MicroStrategy.

Standard reports are sent to 50 executives via MicroStrategy Narrowcast Server™ automated e-mails on a daily basis while approximately 280 newly trained ‘self-service’ and ‘power users’ in the company’s merchandising, finance and store teams can access the data to meet their own ad hoc requirements.

“To be honest, the business response and user adoption to our business intelligence platform has been absolutely fantastic,” explains Johnson. “It’s exceeded our expectations in terms of how valuable the business perceives it to be. Retail is a fast moving environment and, especially in our sector, is extremely fast moving in terms of the volume and speed of new products coming to market. Every single week we have literally hundreds of new product lines and to be able to analyse the performance of those lines, on a real-time basis, is hugely beneficial with regard to our ability to respond quickly to newly emerging trends.”

When asked “Why MicroStrategy?”, Johnson replied, “We went to tender to find the right BI solution and MicroStrategy was chosen for its single consolidated platform and mature web based report delivery. We also value MicroStrategy’s analytical capability, ease of use, speed of reporting and sheer scalability. As a result of our MicroStrategy implementation, we can look back and see that we’ve added real value to the business, and look forward to building on that success as Zavvi continues to win out in the challenging markets in which we operate.”

“For the first time the stores also have visibility into all of their inventory in real-time so now the stores are able to see what their in-stock position is at any point during the day. Previously, they might have had a situation where a customer asked for a particular product and the system told them that they had two in stock; however, what it didn’t tell them was that those two units had actually been sold earlier on during the day. With the new system they will now be able to deliver an accurate response to the customer and not raise any false expectations that the product is there when it’s not. Again, from a customer service perspective, that’s a great bonus for our stores.”