NET-A-PORTER Case Study

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The Challenge
With a rapidly growing business and ever increasing but isolated information silos, NET-A-PORTER.COM needed to find a way to better leverage its corporate information.  The business had a single reporting server that held most of the historic and current information that was required by senior management and the commercial teams, but providing rapid and customised access to this information was problematic and could only be achieved with the involvement of the company’s IT specialists.

“Each morning we took snapshots of our application’s databases and loaded onto our Reporting Server so that our more technically experienced users could undertake analysis in Access and Excel,” explained Nikki Irvine - NET-A-PORTER.COM’s Management Information Systems Manager. “This in itself was very limiting and most of the management and operational teams were provided with standardised reports which were created by the IT department. We had the capability of building different views to provide more customised and specific reports but these views and report templates had to be designed and built from scratch, taking time and diverting the IT team away from day-to-day infrastructure management and business critical project development.”

NET-A-PORTER.COM recognised that to help sustain its business growth it needed to dramatically enhance its reporting capabilities and provide individuals across the business with the ability to access and work with information far more intuitively. “I was given a remit to develop a centralised data warehouse that could be used by business users to obtain the information that they needed, when they needed it and in a format that they could understand,” explained Nikki. “It was clear from the outset that the key driver of this project would be the provision of end-user tools that would allow business users to be self serving.”

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