Casual Male drills deeper into business intelligence

DM News, 08/30/07

By Chantal Todé

In an effort to achieve a more holistic view of its business, the multichannel merchant Casual Male Retail Group recently went live with a new business intelligence platform from QuantiSense that pulls plan data, merchandise data, and sales and inventory data from its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

"Business intelligence is key to better serving our customers and unlocking the competitive advantage that resides in our data," said Dennis Hernreich, COO, Casual Male Retail Group, in a statement. The company's existing analytical systems, however, weren't providing the kind of insight the planning and allocation team wanted.

Atlanta-based QuantiSense's software will enable the multichannel merchant of big and tall men's apparel to conduct analyses of retail, catalog and Web sales, and consolidate cross-channel data into a single view of the business. The platform is being delivered across both the Casual Male XL and Rochester Big & Tall Clothing chains.

Using the Store Ranking Workbench, the Casual Male Retail Group, Canton, MA, will be able to group and rank stores or products based on how they perform. For instance, an apparel retailer might want to group stores based on what merchandise price point is most profitable in those stores. The retailer would end up with three store groupings: high, medium and low priced items. This will provide an organizing principle for the business.

The system also provides: A best-practices retail data warehouse optimized for analysis of years of historial data, including daily sales detail and store-SKU-day-level inventory; role-based user-interfaces and Playbooks, for using best practices to turn insights into action; and the QuantiSense Retail Learning Infrastructure for highlighting exceptions and business opportunities.