Customer Story
WashTec Machine Learning
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Monsoon & Exasol
Monsoon slashes report times from 18hrs to minutes with Exasol
Case Study
Driving Personalization and Customer-Centricity
Discover how Monsoon Accessorize, a leading UK fashion retailer, transformed its operations and customer engagement through deeper and faster data insights. Facing the challenges of a fast-paced retail environment and the need for real-time insights, Monsoon adopted Exasol’s high-performance analytics engine to centralize data, accelerate reporting, and drive personalized customer experiences.
By implementing Exasol’s high-performance analytics engine, Monsoon has empowered its business users with self-service analytics and timely insights. The benefits have positively impacted the entire organization, allowing Monsoon to drive process optimization, enhance decision-making, and deliver personalized customer experiences, including:
Customer Loyalty
Increased customer satisfaction and loyalty via targeted marketing campaigns and personalized experiences enabled by a comprehensive single customer view
Segmentation Speed
Rapid development of customer segmentations, achieving a significant number within three months for highly targeted campaigns
Operational Visibility
Improved distribution center efficiency through real-time visibility into order volumes and inventory levels
Accelerated Reporting
Streamlined reporting and faster decision-making with runtimes reduced from 18 hours to mere minutes
Embracing Data-Driven Transformation
Monsoon Accessorize, a prominent UK-based fashion retailer with over 50 years of history, has undergone a significant transformation in recent years. With a strong presence in the UK and Ireland, with over 150 stores, and an international reach through its global website the company faced challenges in harnessing all of its data to gain a competitive edge in a tough and complex retail landscape. The company embarked on a successful turnaround strategy, placing data and analytics at the core of its approach to achieve true customer-centricity.
Location
United Kingdom
Employees
1000+
Industry
Retail
Product
Exasol Data Warehouse
Prior to their data transformation, Monsoon was reliant on an outdated Oracle database that resulted in lengthy report generation times, which often took hours. A heavy reliance on the BI team for even basic reporting needs created bottlenecks and hindered timely decision-making, resulting in critical Monday morning business reporting being delayed.
These challenges underscored the pressing need for change. Monsoon set out to realize a vision of “data and analytics anytime, anywhere through the eyes of the customer.” A vision that needed a modern, flexible, and scalable data platform that could keep pace with their evolving needs and provide a comprehensive single customer view.
Immediate Impact
Reliable and Fast reporting
After selecting Exasol as its data warehouse platform the company soon experienced an immediate impact. Critical reports on sales and stock that used to run all day Sunday into Monday morning became reliable and fast, running in minutes or seconds. Jon Tanton Brown, BI and Data Consultant at Monsoon, joked:
“The life expectancy of our employees may have actually increased because Monday morning stress levels decreased so much!”
This immediate impact set the stage for a broader cultural shift at Monsoon Accessorize. The successful implementation of Exasol not only alleviated technical pain points but also instilled confidence among business users in the data.
Driving Efficiency, Insights, and Customer Satisfaction with Self-Service Analytics
Monsoon took a significant step forward in their data journey by implementing MicroStrategy as their BI front-end. This involved rebuilding the presentation layer on top of Exasol, creating a series of fact and dimension tables, some of which contained billions of rows. The new structure provided a solid foundation for self-service analytics. Monsoon was then able to train non-technical users to self-serve across all data in the warehouse, including sales, stock, product movement, purchase orders, and more, without relying on the BI team.
The company delivered many high-impact projects including:
Shifted the focus of meetings from reviewing numbers to making data-driven decisions and enabling teams to act promptly on insights.
These reports, which previously took hours to run, could now be generated in minutes or even seconds. This empowered business users, from executives to store managers, to make data-driven decisions based on up-to-date information.
By providing real-time visibility into order volumes, inventory levels, and operational metrics, the team enabled more effective planning and optimization of distribution center processes.
Enabling customer service teams to intervene promptly, reducing the risk of order cancellations and improving customer satisfaction.
By combining data from various touchpoints, such as email, social media, and website interactions, Monsoon measures the impact campaign on customer engagement, conversion rates, and revenue.
Test, Fail, Learn
Building the Single Customer View
One of Monsoon’s primary goals was to create a single customer view to enable personalized marketing and gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior. Exasol’s speed and flexibility allowed them to rapidly develop and iterate on this initiative.
By comparing millions of records, sometimes with fuzzy matching, Monsoon created a golden copy. Over several sprints, the build process ended up running in under a minute, resulting in a much faster and more agile way of working. For example, the BI team were able to sit with the CRM team, quickly iterate around requirements, develop database views, test out logic, and create Microstrategy dashboards within a couple days of go-live.
By involving the business early and often and providing them with real-time insights, Monsoon significantly reduced time-to-value.
Beyond the Data Warehouse: Exasol as a Central Data Engine
As Monsoon’s data capabilities grew, they began to explore new ways to leverage Exasol beyond traditional data warehousing. They recognized the potential of using Exasol as a centralized data engine, powering an operational data store for data reconciliation and integration.
As shown below, Monsoon rebuilt their data pipelines in Python to efficiently load data from their core systems, website, and third-party sources into an operational data store in Exasol. The ODS is an immutable record of the business. From there, Monsoon can build presentation views for MicroStrategy, as well as use the ODS for reconciliation between different systems, becoming a valuable tool for the business to audit things like stock improvements, orders and loyalty performance.
Empowering the BI team
Boosting Productivity
As a lean BI team, optimizing productivity was a top priority for Monsoon, especially during the company’s ERP replacement project. From a data and reporting perspective, the key requirement was to ensure a seamless transition. Monsoon wanted to maintain the ability to compare data across time periods (e.g., week-overweek, year-over-year) and keep their reporting dimensions consistent, even though the underlying data feeds and structures were different. This necessitated extensive changes to the data pipeline and models in Exasol.
To overcome these challenges, the BI team leveraged Exasol’s speed and flexibility to quickly create new tables and views that accommodated both the legacy and new data structures. This allowed them to maintain consistency in reporting during the transition period and enabled them to go-live with minimal issues from a data and reporting perspective.
Culture Change From the Top
The newfound speed and reliability of data had a ripple effect throughout the organization, laying the groundwork for a broader cultural shift at Monsoon. This positive experience led to the decision to establish a dedicated analytics team directly reporting to the CEO, Nick Stowe, underscoring the strategic importance of their work.
Scaling for the Future
Embracing Exasol’s SaaS Solution
In a strategic move to support their growing data needs and future-proof their analytics capabilities, Monsoon Accessorize recently migrated from Exasol’s on-premises solution to the Exasol SaaS platform. This transition was driven by the desire to eliminate storage constraints and gain the flexibility to scale their data infrastructure on-demand.
Monsoon experienced minimal downtime during the migration, and the benefits were immediately apparent. The SaaS platform’s elasticity allows Monsoon to scale their data resources up and down based on demand, optimizing costs without compromising on performance. This flexibility is particularly valuable for managing peak periods, such as seasonal sales or marketing campaigns, where data volumes and analytics requirements surge.
Next Steps
Enhancing Analytics and Customer Understanding
Looking ahead, Monsoon aims to enhance its use of data in several key areas:
In-depth stock analytics to optimise stock and reduce promotional discounting required to sell through
Website optimisation strategies, leveraging new insights through Google Analytics 4 data combined with sales and stock positions
Continuing to understand loyalty customer base at a more granular level to personalise offers and web journeys at scale
These initiatives will enable Monsoon to make more informed decisions about inventory management, improve the online shopping experience, and deliver personalized marketing and customer experiences.
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