Founded in 1882, the Brains brand has become a must stock item across Wales and is inextricably linked to the Welsh experience. An expanding company, Brains has seen turnover increase from £77 million to over £120 million in the last five years, its pub estate grow to 270 pubs and now serves over 2000 free trade customers. The company remains committed to supplying the perfect pint as well as delivering great service to both trade customers and consumers.
In need of an overview – TARGIT the intuitive solution
Having expanded as a business quickly, Brains had a number of different applications and tools to satisfy the organization’s need for information on sales, costs etc. They invested in a new ERP system Microsoft Dynamics NAV and required a Microsoft integrated BI tool to analyze their Navision data. As part of their long term IT strategy, they wanted a BI solution that integrated with their current ERP and sat on a SQL platform. They required an end-user interface that was intuitive and easy to use, with low costs for purchase and maintenance.
“TARGIT was very well received when demonstrated to us. Being users of Cognos Powerplay, we were familiar with BI tools and multi dimensional analysis, and we were suitably impressed by the look and feel of TARGIT as well as by its functionality. Our users in the organization have varying levels of IT competence and TARGIT offered a range of licenses that offered us varying levels of permissions to suit our user base”, says Deborah Howard, IT Applications Project Manager at Brains.
TARGIT saves time and trouble – fast and easily
“Visibility of data previously unavailable is a major benefit of TARGIT, as well as the ease and speed of retrieving that data. A colleague who does not use TARGIT had witnessed his marketing colleague in retail using TARGIT to answer a query of his on a particular product sale and remarked to the IT department that he wanted to have TARGIT as well”, tells Deborah Howard.
Prior to the implementation of TARGIT BI Suite, the access of the retail marketing department to epos data for liquor sales and food sales at each of Brains’ outlets was time consuming, difficult and sometimes unachievable. Its only access to data was via static reports. “Since the implementation of TARGIT, figures required for management meetings have been reduced from 2.5 days’ work to 20 minutes. We are now able to analyze trends of our beer sales by geographical area or retail outlet template, and we can monitor promotions easily and sooner than ever before”, states Deborah Howard.
Brains can influence the trends with TARGIT BI Suite
TARGIT BI Suite has helped Brains outline trends and highlight possible problem areas that they traditionally would not have been aware of so quickly. “The sale of alcohol is dependent on the weather, events, fashion and trends; prior to TARGIT the analysis of these trends were always after the fact. With sales information updated daily we can now start to influence the trends rather than follow”, concludes Deborah Howard.
