Dansk Supermarked Group sells more products than any other group in Denmark, and in addition to the impressing sales figures and more than 1,000 stores, the IT department has build an enormous data warehouse with information about more than 1,000,000 different products. To maintain overview of the constantly growing data amounts in purchase and sales, Dansk Supermarked has chosen TARGIT Business Intelligence Suite as the group's primary analysis and prognoses tool.

Hjørring, July 4, 2006 - The sales culture in Dansk Supermarked is famous beyond the borders of Denmark, and during two generations, both the original founder, Ferdinand Salling, and later his son, Herman Salling, have been setting the standard for great business leadership, a healthy sense of what a great business comprises, and a special ability to always centre on the customers' needs. Qualities than since 1906 has made Dansk Supermarked Group one of the most solid in their industry with chain stores such as Netto, Bilka, Føtex, Tøj & Sko, A-Z and not least the Salling department stores as unequivocal evidence of the success.

Obviously, the success is mostly a result of an incredible business sense, but Dansk Supermarked has refined its metier and created a unique structure for purchase and sales across the group chains. Opposite what the competitors do, Dansk Supermarked has chosen to unite purchase and sales into one function, and therefore, it is crucial that the purchasers can always maintain an overview of both functions.

Products are carefully monitored

TARGIT BI Suite lies on top of Dansk Supermarked's data warehouse, and even though most people, with a little training, can learn to find their way around a large Bilka department store, it is absolutely impossible to find your way around in the enormous amount of data concerning the group's total product offerings - without the help of TARGIT BI Suite. Purchasers and analysts have access to more than 33 billion rows of data with product information in the gigantic datawarehouse, and without exception, all products are carefully monitored in the purchase and sales phase. Implementation of TARGIT BI Suite is part of a large process with the goal to establish a joined platform for all business units.

"We have started a huge standardization project across our IT systems, and instead of developing specific solutions on our own, as we did in the past, we are now choosing the optimal standard systems. And TARGIT was chosen as the front-end tool for our data warehouse. The goal is to standardize our system architecture in a way that best support our future development. We don't want to spend too many resources constantly developing system as we have seen in the ERP business," says Kurt Roland Andreassen, IT-system development manager in Dansk Supermarket, who is responsible for all IT development and maintenance in the Dansk Supermarked Group.

Pioneers in business intelligence

Even though Dansk Supermarked chose to outsource large parts of the IT development, the internal development department has chosen to keep business intelligence in-house. Dansk Supermarked has some of Denmark's most experienced business intelligence developers and they work closely together with TARGIT's developers in Hjørring. Dansk Supermarked has one of the world's most complex Microsoft BI Installations, and since TARGIT BI Suite exposes many of the new facilities in SQL Server 2005 it is possible to realize a quick "return on investment" on the solution.

"Considering the way we wanted to design the data foundation in our data warehouse, we have made the most sensible decision by choosing TARGIT as the supplier of our business intelligence tools. We looked thoroughly at other large business intelligence suppliers but our evaluation was that users would benefit most from TARGIT. The solution is simply more user friendly. In addition, experiences the TARGIT organisation as being informal and non-bureaucratic, and they have offered an extreme support for us, which has contributed to the fast implementation of the solution", says Kim Nissen, Department Manager in Dansk Supermarked's internal development department.

Many of Dansk Supermarked's products are ordered through automatic re-ordering and furthermore, the purchasers are often working with product prognoses one year ahead in time. Therefore, it is crucial to the purchasers that they, at all times, can follow the sales curves for the individual products. There is simply not enough space in the stores, if products are on the shelves for a longer period of time than the expected time of sales. Therefore, TARGIT BI Suite is an essential tool, when the purchasers need to monitor the flow of products, purchase statistics for products and stores, inventory transaction statistics, campaign plans, and problem products when sales, on rare occasions, do not turn out as expected.

"For anything in the world, we want to avoid that our customers cannot find the needed product in the stores. This is central to us. Therefore, we are using TARGIT to analyze product sales, move products among department stores, when that is affordable, and to analyze overall what happens to our sales when prices are changed. The only thing that must not happen is for a product to be on the shelves for too long a period of time, because we constantly have new products coming in, and worst case, we will run out of space. TARGIT helps us avoid that situation and that is incredibly valuable to us," Kurt Roland Andersen concludes.

About Dansk Supermarked

The Dansk Supermarked Group was built on the foundation, created around Salling Department Store in 1906. In 1960 Jysk Supermarked was established - same year as the first Føtex supermarket. In 1964 Herman Salling entered into a partnership with A. P. Møller, who took over 50 pct of the company shares. Jysk Supermarked now changed its name into Dansk Supermarked A/S. 10 years after establishing the first Føtex supermarket, Dansk Supermarked A/S opened the first Bilka hypermarket. In the early eighties, the discount chain Netto opened, and later the chains Tøj & Sko and A-Z. In the late eighties and early nineties, management started looking at the English and German markets, and the Netto concept proved to be the main driver for success abroad.

About TARGIT

TARGIT was founded in 1986 with the current CEO, Morten Sandlykke, as one of the founding partners. Today, TARGIT is the largest developer of business intelligence in Denmark and the core product, TARGIT Business Intelligence Suite, is distributed by more than 250 business partners around the world. The first business intelligence-product from TARGIT was based on the idea of user-friendliness, flexibility, and simple implementation; core values which have since characterized TARGIT’s solutions. TARGIT is Microsoft Gold Certified Partner within the competencies ISV/Software Solutions and Data Management Solutions.