Sybase IQ - Phildar has accelerated its decision-making and increased its sales revenue

Putting Managers Back in Control
As an established leader in the knitting thread market, Phildar decided to expand its core business to ready-to-wear clothing. That meant it needed to distribute a collection of more than 1,000 items across almost 700 stores in 10 countries. At first, Phildar let each store choose its own stock. However, the company faced big challenges because of a wide range of inventory needs and sales revenues among the individual franchises.   

"Our network of franchisees showed notable differences in their sales revenue, by a factor of 1 to 20," said Enzo Giandomenico, assistant managing director at Phildar. "In ready-to-wear, the variation was even more obvious—the ratio between the largest and smallest stores was more than 50 to 1."

To better control inventory, Phildar wanted to rapidly centralize management of the ready-to-wear lines. This required the company to place its new collection in stores via a set of stock recommendations. At the same time, Phildar wanted to allow franchises to add styles, ask for specific products or even, in the case of the smallest stores, decline recommendations from the company headquarters. 

"We had to analyze sales to start the re-stocking, refine the collections, resume manufacture of certain articles and so on," Giandomenico said. "We had a real need for precision, for detailed analysis and a good database. It was impossible to review 660 stores and 1,000 references each morning."

With its existing database system, Phildar struggled to get a timely view of sales and inventory at a detailed level (including style, color and size) while managing a large quantity of information from the individual stores. The volume of data was handled without any problem. However, processing the analytics pushed Phildar's databases beyond the limits, resulting in long and unpredictable response times. 

This was particularly damaging for store supply managers, who need the most up-to-date information for critical decisions, such as whether to resume or stop a product series. 

To help improve its decision-making process, Phildar chose Sybase IQ.

"Before choosing Sybase IQ, we had gone to the limits of what a traditional database could offer," said Yves Moal, data processing manager at Phildar. "Whereas loading the decision-making databases and user queries could take several hours, Sybase IQ has demonstrated unquestionable performance and administration that needs very few resources."