Danish jewellery company PANDORA offers its customers fashionable, hand-finished pieces at affordable prices. But to help maintain its rapid growth from a single Danish store to over 2,400 concept stores globally, it required a controllable way to access and analyse the increasingly large volumes of company data.
THE COLLECTIBLE, THE CONTEMPORARY
In 1982, Danish goldsmith Per Enevoldsen and his wife Winnie opened a small, local jewelry store in Copenhagen, often traveling to Thailand for inspiration and materials. As they gained a reputation for sleek and contemporary offerings, their focus began to shift from small-scale to wholesale and the PANDORA brand was born.
Over the last 30 years, it has made a significant mark, creating high-quality, collectible pieces that customers can afford. The company has rapidly expanded, now operating in more than 100 countries across six continents. What was once a single store has now become the world’s best-known jewelry brand.
FROM DESIGN TO DISPLAY
Peter Hansen is a manager and global BI architect at PANDORA. He is primarily responsible for making sure that the company remains compliant in the outlined data architecture principles that support the data coming in from company sources.
“PANDORA does everything from design and innovation, to prototyping, manufacturing, distribution and retail,” he says. “We buy up the raw silver and gold and turn it into jewelry.” Yet managing operations from start to sparkling finish means tracking every stage, which results in a lot of internal data. As if that’s not hard enough, PANDORA was also finding it increasingly difficult to cohesively manage data from numerous other diverse data sources.
“We have five different ERP systems that we pull financial information from,” Peter explains. Additionally, PANDORA utilizes more than 20 different providers of retail information. While everyone could see the immense value of having accurate, up-to-date inventory information, since this directly affects what jewelry pieces are available in-store, the complexity of the data reports required for a clear overview of company operations was daunting.
PANDORA required a system that was both controllable and universal. One that would give them more time to finesse and customize data reports, rather than bogging them down with intricate coding requirements.
SAVING TIME WITH INSTANT DATA ACCESS
With a large network of consultants and contributors, PANDORA wanted a solution that would allow its 20 or so internal and external BI developers to be up-and-running in a few hours and spend more time on modeling and analytics and less on codingChoosing TimeXtender came down to ease of implementation, cost and the all-important, ‘Can it work with the ERP that we were implementing?'. TimeXtender, being uniform and automated, met these requirements.
After implementing TimeXtender, Peter noted an immediate reduction of time-consuming data preparation duties. "We save the hours not on the analysis but on the operations to actually just make sure we get the data. I'd say that we spend maybe only 20% of the time we'd previously spent on preparation before TimeXtender."
Peter has also been impressed by how quickly the employees picked up on the fuctionality of the TimeXtender platform. "We've seen new contractors starting with it in the morning of their first day and, after lunch, start being productive in TimeXtender."
A CONTROLLABLE AND STREAMLINED SOLUTION
PANDORA put a great importance on controlled access to data when looking to acquire quality information from multiple sources. With their manufacturing facilities in Thailand, along with departmental offices in Germany, Denmark, Hong Kong and the USA, and with BI development in all five locations, the company needed to secure the data being collected while ensuring that specific employees had access to the data they needed. Peter was pleased to find that with TimeXtender, data was “provided much faster to the people who need it.” He adds, “The configuration part is also easy, meaning that you more or less have a drag-and-drop solution. And it’s very easy to set up data flows, while data can be fully or incrementally loaded.”
This ability to create unique data flows catering to departmental needs is an enormous benefit, as Peter can easily administer data flows and access controls for external contractors. “You have a control interface with user access control, and you can easily set up security rights too. This allows us to utilize new resources relatively quickly.”
A CONTROLLABLE AND STREAMLINED SOLUTION
PANDORA put a great importance on controlled access to data when looking to acquire quality information from multiple sources. With their manufacturing facilities in Thailand, along with departmental offices in Germany, Denmark, Hong Kong and the USA, and with BI development in all five locations, the company needed to secure the data being collected while ensuring that specific employees had access to the data they needed. Peter was pleased to find that with TimeXtender, data was “provided much faster to the people who need it.” He adds, “The configuration part is also easy, meaning that you more or less have a drag-and-drop solution. And it’s very easy to set up data flows, while data can be fully or incrementally loaded.”
This ability to create unique data flows catering to departmental needs is an enormous benefit, as Peter can easily administer data flows and access controls for external contractors. “You have a control interface with user access control, and you can easily set up security rights too. This allows us to utilize new resources relatively quickly.”
EASE IN COLLABORATION
A company the size of PANDORA requires an incredible degree of collaboration among departments and external contractors. Here are Peter’s three practical examples of how PANDORA uses TimeXtender to help manage projects:
• Creating independence – “The developers we use are mainly contractors, so of course we wanted a tool that was controlled by us and not creating a dependency on them.”
• Creating independence – “The developers we use are mainly contractors, so of course we wanted a tool that was controlled by us and not creating a dependency on them.”
• Universal and controllable – “The fact that you don’t have to write much code in this means that the solutions produced are very similar.”
• Easy access to current data – “In manufacturing as well as in our distribution centers, there is a demand for frequent updates. They want to know what’s happening down to each hour, or even quarter hour!”
GAIN A 360º VIEW OF THE CUSTOMER
For PANDORA’s marketing department, being able to combine information from e-commerce and point-of-sale as well as in-store systems that automatically count customers is critically important. TimeXtender has been utilized to combine consumer data with sales data, so that PANDORA can better answer the question, ‘Who actually buy our products?’.
A CONTINUOUS PARTNERSHIP
With the implementation of TimeXtender, PANDORA has been able to simplify data preparation, obtain key consumer insights and support their extended network of skilled contractors. And by enabling this future-proof data estate with TimeXtender, PANDORA is well positioned for any future cloud migration ambitions. For Peter, it is the ease, efficiency and speed of TimeXtender’s data architecture platform that has become instrumental in the company’s data analytics.
TimeXtender : September 27, 2021
TimeXtender