Business Case

ESPRIT is in the premium apparels business with around 40 stores located across India along with presence in the UK and Australia. Wunderman had a reporting team of 35 employees to collate the data emanating from these 40 stores in multiple formats and from multiple sources into .csv files. The multiplicity of sources coupled with the volume of data generated necessitated manual data clean up and data integrity checks justifying the size of the reporting team. Once ready, data was loaded into Excel and analysis was done predominantly using excel prior to presentation. In the current scenario, any comparison report required for decision support took around a week for data collation, analysis, and presentation. The existing solution was not scalable beyond a point.

In conclusion, Wunderman needed removal of the bottle neck perpetuated by impaired decision support system due to the time delay in delivery of comparison reports at current operational levels along with reporting bottlenecks hampering expansion resulting in increased resource cost.

Implemented Solution

Haritham Technologies proposed to revamp the existing Decision Support System into a robust scalable one while simultaneously reducing the dependence on Manpower. Towards achieving that, Haritham Technologies stepped in with a Business Intelligence system streamlining Data Storage, Data Retrieval, and Data Delivery/Presentation encompassing data collation and clean up while ensuring data integrity up to and including corporate presentations at the click of a mouse.

Haritham Technologies developed the client facing application using HTML, CSS, Javascript, Microsoft C# on Microsoft ASP.Net 3.5 web framework, Ajax Toolkit, Microsoft Chart Control, Microsoft Interop Libraries, and Microsoft Powerpoint API Libraries. An interactive API was written on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 as an encrypted stored procedure management service. Microsoft Data Transformation Services were pressed into service for data modeling. Microsoft ADO.Net was used to connect to the Microsoft SQL 2005 database. Microsoft IIS 6.0 was configured as an environment to host the solution. Users were authenticated through a secured web protocol rendering the preconfigured settings and rights ensuring appropriate levels of security. Reports such as Revenue, Unprocessed Revenue, Category Performance, Store Performance, New Enrollment – Store Wise, Conversion rate, Platinum Members – Store Wise, Membership at a Glance, Dashboard PPT Notes could now be generated in a matter of minutes using the internal formulae management system and custom controls developed by Haritham Technologies. Business chart libraries, Microsoft Interop Libraries connecting to Microsoft Powerpoint API were used to generate extensive user-interactive reports for better Decision Support and presentation.

Benefits of the Implemented Solution

A single resource was enough to generate the reports necessary for ESPRIT's Operational and Decision Support needs, thereby significantly reducing the resource burden on Wunderman. The implemented solution also reduced the time taken for generating a comparison report to a maximum of 15 minutes, and the output could be configured in the form of a Powerpoint presentation further reducing the time taken to prepare the same. The implemented solution was robust and scalable allowing unencumbered expansion without worry of bottlenecks.

Technical Stack