Setting up the data analytics infrastructure for a fashion e-tailer

Executive Summary 

Context: The launch of new age e-commerce companies and platforms has transformed the traditional interactions that would take place between a customer and a seller. As new brands come up and existing ones try to solidify their market, this quantum leap has been made possible by access to different platforms which simplify ‘behind the scenes’ processes such as inventory management, order management, customer support management etc. 

Although these platforms provide the much needed agility but their disconnectedness often throws a spanner in the most critical aspect that determines the growth of such enterprises i.e. speedy data driven decision making. 

In such scenarios, key decision makers spend an inordinate amount of time in just consolidating the necessary data in one place. This not just delays key decisions but often impairs the leadership’s visibility into the health of the business. 

Problem Statement: A leading lifestyle e-tailer reached out to Saras where challenges due to non-conformity of data from different platforms had reached a head. Not only was the brand utilizing the services of 10+ disjoint ERP software to manage their backend processes, but they had limited visibility into the actual metrics that they ought to be keeping a track of on a daily basis. 

The brand required required greater visibility into the day-to-day health of their business operations. In addition to this, the leadership also wanted to transition to a scenario wherein all the different platform communicate in coherence with each other and provide data as well as insights expeditiously.  

The Saras Approach: Saras utilized its proprietary software, Daton built on 10,000+ hours of engineering and e-commerce data. Daton’s inbuilt connectors allowed the brand to integrate data from different platforms like Magento, Unicommerce, Freshdesk, Facebook etc. under one single common umbrella.  

Saras then went on to establishing a data warehouse for the brand where all the accumulated data could be stored, cleaned, modified and transformed as per the requirements of analysts. 

Saras’ team of analysts worked in conjunction with Function Heads to arrive at a list of KPIs that they ought to be monitoring at a daily, weekly and monthly cadence. Post obtaining consensus and closure on the list of metrics, Saras utilized their proprietary e-commerce descriptive analytics tool Halo. 

With the help of Halo, Saras’ analysts created 80+ business dashboards across different functions such as Category, Marketing, Merchandising and Supply Chain to enable function heads with faster and accurate decision making.  

Impact delivered: The integration of different platforms under Daton and creation of custom dashboards revitalized the decision making starting right at the top and percolating down to different functions across the organization. 

Inspired by the results brought in due to the overhaul of reporting infrastructure, the brand also proposed a similar exercise be undertaken to gauge the performance of each of the pages of its website. Saras integrated 10+ data sources to create 80+ dashboards across different functions. These dashboards optimized the time toinsight by ~75% and rationalized effort going into data analysis by 80%