Briscoe Group: Unlocking retail data insights with on-prem data piped to cloud analytics
About Briscoe Group
Briscoe Group is one of New Zealand's leading retailers, operating across the homeware and sporting goods categories under two brands: Briscoes Homeware and Rebel Sport. Briscoe Group has stores all across the country as well as offering a digital retail experience through its websites.
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About CDP/Mero Group
CDP/Mero is an enterprise analytics consultancy serving businesses throughout New Zealand, specializing in establishing data strategy, analytics architecture, platform, and solution delivery. CDP/Mero is a Google Cloud Partner.
By connecting its on-premise data warehouse with BigQuery, Briscoe Group is achieving fast, automated daily data reporting in under 3 minutes while creating the potential for new insights to drive its business.
Google Cloud results
- Daily manual sales reports are now automated with 75% time saved
- Manual sellthrough reports that were prone to human error now run under automation in less than 3 minutes
- Data is now combined from multiple sources to create new analytics offerings and improved business intelligence
- All improvements achieved while maintaining highest standards of data integrity, security, and privacy
Deeper analysis and fast automation through BigQuery
Briscoe Group (BGP) is a pioneer of the New Zealand retail landscape. Running close to 90 stores across three brands and a strong online presence, BGP is a well regarded mainstay for shoppers across the nation.
In 2008, BGP adopted an on-premise SAP business warehouse, which underpins its retail and supply chain operations to this day. But as the company began considerations around an improved data strategy, BGP saw a need to extract the raw data into a dedicated data service that could unlock new analytics opportunities.
"We wanted more flexibility, more agility, and the ability to bring together a range of external data feeds. We also wanted the ability to experiment, which would be a challenge to do inside a traditional, on-premise data warehouse."
—Jeffrey Westcott, IT Manager, Briscoe Group"We wanted increased flexibility, more agility, and the ability to bring together a range of external data feeds," says Jeffrey Westcott, IT Manager at BGP. "We also wanted the ability to experiment, which would be a challenge to do inside a traditional, on-premise data warehouse."
Having a long-term technical partnership with CDP/Mero Group, BGP explored its options to develop a hybrid model where it would maintain its on-premise warehouse while building a new data platform in the cloud.
Integrating security and privacy into data management by design
In retail, maintaining a high integrity data warehouse is fundamental to business operations. So in its data strategy design project, BGP leadership required adherence to three critical values: integrity, security, and privacy.
"A key consideration was to see our new platform architecture designed to ensure we could trust the data," says Westcott. "That's a strong point of the business warehouse and we didn't want to lose that."
Performing its due diligence, BGP found Google's certifications and data handling procedures were what they had hoped for. Features like zero access by default, policy tags that manage PII encryption and data masking, plus single sign-on and multifactor authentication support through the company's existing enterprise identity service. These and more all worked together to give the retailer confidence that both security and privacy settings would meet their needs.
With CDP taking the engineering lead, a one-way data pipeline was designed to pull data from the SAP Business Warehouse into BigQuery. The process would make available all existing data, while roles and structures were built to ensure careful access controls offering both a production area and a development area for experimentation.
"We're a lean team, working across many functions. CDP enabled us to dedicate time to embedding our new analytics capabilities into the Group and training our teams," says Tom Prusher, Data & Analytics Lead at BGP. "Partnering with CDP enabled us to build out our analytics capability. Through their experienced data engineers and scientists, we were able to build an infrastructure that enabled us to provide insights to the business. The CDP team brought the technical skills to execute on what we wanted to achieve."
Having started the strategy plan in 2020, the BGP's BigQuery data platform was completed in a matter of months and launched in 2021.
Data automation and standardization through BigQuery
One of the primary areas of opportunity for BGP was to reduce the manual load on its team when it comes to generating reports from the on-prem warehouse.
"Automation is the biggest benefit we've achieved with our use of BigQuery so far," says Prusher. "People used to run manual reports, now it's automatically aggregated for every store across the business and distributed to stakeholders. We're getting the right information in front of the right people every day. The visibility improvement has been massive."
"Automation is the biggest benefit we've achieved with our use of BigQuery so far. People used to run manual reports, now it's automatically aggregated for every store across the business and automatically emailed to stakeholders. We're getting the right information in front of the right people every day. The visibility improvement has been massive."
—Tom Prusher, Data & Analytics Lead, Briscoe GroupPreviously, a standard process for intraday sales reporting would see BGP run a manual report at 12 PM to deliver an output by 1 PM. Now this same report, through BigQuery is now an automated task, which is reusable across trading events and doesn't require manual intervention. Additionally, the team has been able to drill down to greater levels of detail than previously possible through extracts and spreadsheet limitations. This enables greater insight and learnings across the business.
These reports are also now delivered automatically from BigQuery into dashboards, which are accessible across the organization, with fields showing when the data was last updated so insights are always clearly understood.
"Previously we had to run reports, apply manual parameters, set how long you wanted the report to run for, wait for the results, then set up formatting to make it readable," says Westcott. "Now the data feeds flow into our data visualization platform and it's just frictionless."
Alongside the time and efficiency gains through new data automations, BGP also found that its new BigQuery data platform added standardization to the reporting structures that were previously often lacking.
"Previously, users across different departments might run reports themselves based on their own assumptions of what they need, and come out with different numbers," says Prusher. "Now we have standard reports for things like sellthrough and they just run the same way every morning. The centralized system means when requests for new reports arrive we can implement them just once and everyone can access the same standard report." As a result, reporting and analytics has become a lot more streamlined.
Uncovering new insights and new questions for the future
Along with new standard processes, dashboards, and automated reports, the BGP team is finding new ways to correlate data through BigQuery. By bringing together more data sources, they are creating opportunities to understand sales results alongside other factors.
"Now we can look at how many people were in a store compared to the sales results for the day," says Prusher. "That's an important question that we've never been able to analyze before, and it's given our executive team great new insights. In fact we've now been able to link weather data. All this extra data enriches our view and understanding of our sales performances."
Insights are also now being used for buyers and planners to analyze seasonal product sellthrough with reports being generated in less than three minutes compared to hours in previously manual processes that were vulnerable to human error. Supply chain delivery timings and delays are also visually represented in dashboards in an instant where previously it was a challenge to identify where the problems may be arising.
"Previously, if you wanted to know if some goods were late in transit, you'd have to find the transactions, we'd need to extract them all, find the oldest one and calculate based on dates via excel manually," says Prusher. "Now we can immediately have anything older than 'x' days show up in red. It's that simple." BGP is still in its early days when it comes to Data & Analytics, but the group already has plans to continue expanding these capabilities by bringing in additional technical talent to continue to generate business value.
Exploring new data models for deeper business intelligence
As BGP progresses in its experimentation with BigQuery, the team is embracing the opportunity to integrate and explore with its data. Encouraging teams to make new requests and to continue to test what's possible.
"We often think we don't have enough data," says Prusher. "But when you start to see it all in BigQuery, you realize we've got plenty and that we need to start thinking about how we are going to turn this data into insights. It's kind of like we are standing at the bottom of the mountain looking up at all the possibilities. It's exciting where we can go from here."
"We often think we don't have enough data. But when you see it all in BigQuery, you realize we've got plenty and that we need to be thinking about how we are going to turn this data into insights. It's kind of like we are standing at the bottom of the mountain looking up at all the possibilities. It's exciting where we can go from here."
—Tom Prusher, Data & Analytics Lead, Briscoe GroupBGP is working closely with CDP to continue advancing its data capabilities. It is using Jupyter Notebooks to run more complex python models, embracing the cloud flexibility to run bigger or smaller processes as required with just an adjustment in code configurations.
Westcott reiterates that its journey so far would never have been possible without the guidance of CDP to build the right foundations for its use of Google Cloud. But it's now exciting the whole business to be able to embrace what's possible with data through these new capabilities.
"If anybody knows how to deal with large volumes of data, it's Google," says Westcott. "We feel confident we could not have built the system as securely without the huge amount of experience CDP brought to us. And we believe we've made the right decision with Google Cloud."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Briscoe Group
Briscoe Group is one of New Zealand's leading retailers, operating across the homeware and sporting goods categories under two brands: Briscoes Homeware and Rebel Sport. Briscoe Group has stores all across the country as well as offering a digital retail experience through its websites.
About CDP/Mero Group
CDP/Mero is an enterprise analytics consultancy serving businesses throughout New Zealand, specializing in establishing data strategy, analytics architecture, platform, and solution delivery. CDP/Mero is a Google Cloud Partner.