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Introducing Kurt Geiger
Kurt Geiger is a luxury British footwear and accessories retailer. The company owns three in-house brands, including KG and Carvela. As well as its independent shops, Kurt Geiger has a large presence in department stores with 170 concessions nationwide, including within Harrods and Selfridges. It also has a strong web presence at KurtGeiger.com.
The Challange: Using IBM Planning Analytics to Drive Digital Transformation
Sound analytics and reporting systems have always been key to driving smarter decisions and operational efficiency at Kurt Geiger.
Rather than use off-the-shelf solutions, the IT team has developed and run their own bespoke IBM Planning Analytics (formerly TM1) platform for nearly 20 years. It comprises of three independent environments:
- A Finance System model, which enables global budgeting and forecasting and is used for everything from banking through to trading reports and financial statements.
- A buying model called “Range Plan”, which allows the company to plan and order new stock.
- A Merchandise model, which helps the company with planning and selling products
Over the past five years, Kurt Geiger has been on a path to digital transformation; one that has allowed the company to get the right products to the right places, at the right time, price and volume. This enables them to react quickly to changes in the market and customer demand, ultimately driving more sales.
Or as Marie Vidler, Finance Systems Manager, puts it
“being able to look backwards and plan forwards”.
What Kurt Geiger Was Seeking
Although Kurt Geiger had developed IBM Planning Analytics in-house and previously worked with corporate support companies, for the next phase of their digital transformation they wanted a fresh approach.
Marie Vidler explains;
“We’ve worked with different IBM Planning Analytics developers, and Sempre’s knowledge has outshone all of them. They opened our eyes to possibilities we hadn’t seen before”.
Sempre’s flexible ‘service over sales’ attitude was also more in line with their own culture and approach.
Marie says;
“Sempre understood how a business like ours needed to be supported. They kept us going until we had everything in place to make the improvements we needed. They didn’t try to push us into new products before we were ready.”
What happend: realising hidden potential
Key to Sempre’s brief was to connect Kurt Geiger’s disparate systems and data, so the same information didn’t need to be entered by different teams. This would help save time, prevent errors, and increase operational efficiency right across the business.
Marie explains;
“Data accuracy has a big impact right from the beginning; when we’re planning to buy the products, making sure we capture the right information for our stock system and then onto our various partners, stores and websites.”
Increased efficiency has improved product and order creation for our merchandising teams and provided previously unavailable analytics on future spending by product type.
Another element of the digital transformation project was to automate trading and financial reporting across each store to drive deeper insight and financial resilience.
Along with saving hours of manual work, the business can now produce branch- and brand-specific weekly trading reports.
Sempre was able to add even further value to this process by reducing the load times, enabling further automation of the weekly trading reports for the entire business.
The outcome: saving time, increasing insight
Upgrading their IBM Planning Analytics environment has standardised Kurt Geiger’s reporting – increasing operational efficiency and saving considerable money, time and effort.
Marie says;
“By moving to a digital platform, we’ve taken a lot of costs away. We also worked out that by reducing our paper use we’re saving 30 trees a year.”
Sempre’s technical capability has also been transformative for their weekly merchandising plan and strategy; critical for a business that wants to keep pace with its customers.
The team used to spend half their Sunday processing data and compiling trading reports
ready for the management team on Monday morning. Automation means they’re now ready in less than two hours, with data available in less than an hour.
This saves months of work every year and has given the team their Sundays back, which
is of enormous benefit to both them and the company.
Crucially, it also means the executive board gets the right information at the right time.
Marie says;
“In the past if we hit a two-hour delay at the beginning of a Sunday there was a good chance we wouldn’t produce reports in time for a Monday”.
The new model reduces delay, prevents knock-on effects and empowers the executive board to make faster, smarter decisions. This ultimately drives sales and greater financial resilience.
As Marie explains;
“The executive board can see trading reports on a Sunday afternoon instead of Monday morning and react faster. For the merchandisers this means being able to see a sold-out product in Harrods but a stockpile in Scotland, so we can move that stock around the business faster”.
As well as improving reporting, Sempre also worked to improve operational efficiency with an automatic error-monitoring and alerting system.
Marie explains;
“Now in the morning, I can see instantly if there’s a problem, know exactly what it is and decide what my next steps are as opposed to manually searching the logs to see if there were any errors overnight”.
In a similar vein, the Range Plan system now alert users if they’ve missed a step in the ordering process or need to add more data, improving accuracy and preventing problems every step of the way.
What they said
“With Sempre’s resource and knowledge, we’ve improved and made some major changes in our business. Without their support we would be massively understaffed and under-skilled. I’ve never felt like it’s been a one-off
exercise with them. Sempre has always been keen to grow the partnership between us, and it is definitely a partnership as they’ve become our sole support team.”
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