In an effort to improve its response to buying trends and costumer preferences, sportswear giant Adidas
is now starting to use the MicrosStrategy’s analytics platform which is based on SAP’s cloud-based in-
memory computing platform HANA.
Michael Voegele, Vice President of Global IT and Head of Enterprise Architecture at Adidas Group, phrases
the company’s aim like this: “We want to get more social competitor insights from the web, combined
with our information gathered through our backend systems and other environments.” According to
Voegele this will be achieved through big data analysis: ”In-memory computing, Internet of Things, all
of this we use for strategic big data and actionable insights. That’s what we see as part of a solution to get us closer to our consumers.”
Voegele raises the question “How do you convert from the old style financial reporting towards something that helps you predict what is going to predict what is going to happen in the marketplace,
going to predict what consumers will like, going to influence the consumer with regards to their
purchasing decisions?”
The MicroStrategy analytics platform will serve as the front-end of a combination of four different
data warehouses. Its’s data is collected from the company’s traditional databases, costumer information
that is gathered from their CRM platform and core data sourced from Hadoop clusters.
Voegele explained that Adidas wanted to embrace a faster approach to actually delivering insights to its
business partners, so it sought to provide its global outfit with more BI self-service capabilities,
enabling them to create their own dashboards. The company also prioritised making its analytics
available on mobile platforms. This way the company hopes to communicate and work more
effectively with it’s business partners and customers, as well as to become more flexible in response to
its competitors.
The geographical distances between Adidas and its wholesale, retail and online customers have grown,
some spanning as far as 80.000 km. But the brand is not planning to lose the direct connection to its
individual customers. Describing the nature of the project, Voegele says “Clearly we do see BI as the
foundation to understand each and every consumer – but we’re not talking aggregates. We don’t want
to look at aggregates, we want to look at the single and consumer and make sure he gets a great
experience with Adidas group.” Clearly stating the aim of this project, he concludes: “And hopefully,
at the end of the day, that helps bring us closer to our consumers.”
Read more here.
(image credit: Oscar Chavez)
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