CAMPER and its path towards a Data Driven culture, thanks to Google Cloud
“SoftwareONE has played a key role in Camper’s digital transformation process, understanding the casuistry and needs at all times, accompanying us in the challenge of turning Data into Information” Cristina Frontera Rosselló BT Project Manager
THE ORGANISATION
Camper is one of the most important footwear brands in Spain, with its own stores in more than 40 countries. Founded in 1975 by Lorenzo Fluxa, the company was born in response to the growing demand for shoes with a renewed character. Descended from a family of shoemakers, Fluxa used his knowledge of traditional craftsmanship to establish the foundations of a completely different and innovative brand for his time.
Still, today Camper is a business where the tradition continues to inspire the creation of unique and original designs. Its team of designers and technicians work together to create approximately 500 models per season.
THE CHALLENGE
The retail sector has been immersed for years in its digital transformation, which has inevitably accelerated with the pandemic. This transformation has had a direct impact on sales channels, especially with the great expansion of eCommerce, and has also provided an opportunity to improve many other aspects of the company, such as new management systems, forecasting, logistics, etc.
In Camper, showing the innovative spirit that has characterized them since their origins, they have wanted to be pioneers in this digital transformation by providing their customers and their employees with the best possible experiences.
What does this imply?
- Unite different online and offline data sources by establishing a two-way value exchange with customers and employees.
- To be able to measure what is happening and develop predictive models that allow us to anticipate the market.
- End data silos to have the right information at the right time, understand changes in consumer behavior, and adapt our offer in an agile way.
Camper had a Data Warehouse architecture hosted in an on-premise database server where the different data sources that were being exploited were stored. In addition, it had ETL processes with which information cubes were created for subsequent exploitation with spreadsheets or an analytical tool.
It was a system that could neither grow nor include all the necessary data sources and, more importantly, it did not allow the data extracted from the different sources to be integrated with each other to obtain a complete analysis. In other words, it was neither scalable nor sufficient for decision-making, as it offered only a partial view of the information. This made it incompatible with the objective of Camper’s digital strategy: to be a Data-Driven company.
THE SOLUTION
Our SoftwareONE’s advanced analytics experts conducted an assessment of the company’s existing environments to develop a customized proposal for modernizing them, establishing the business, economic and technological benefits.
The main need was the democratization of data. If Camper wanted to become a Data Driven company, it was necessary to establish a structure that would allow scalability and accessibility to all information together.
The data should conceptually reside in a Data Lake. It was proposed to dump all the data coming from the different tools used by Camper, such as its ERP, Analytics, CRM, Marketing automation, eCommerce, or logistics management tools, among others.
In this Data Lake the data is stored in raw form, then a transformation process is carried out using the Google ecosystem, after which the data is stored in a Data Warehouse developed on BigQuery, where the information is stored.
For the exploitation of the data, different Data Marts complemented with Data Studio for its visualization were assembled.
THE RESULTS
Putting data at the heart of the company’s different processes has been made possible by bringing together information from the various sources, giving them 360º visibility of their business. This undoubtedly marks a turning point in terms of competitive advantages.
Camper’s everyday life has been transformed:
- They have been able to optimize costs by analyzing profitability by store.
- Their marketing strategies are data-driven, so they can offer much more personalized experiences (subscriber analytics, impact analysis, etc.).
- They have improved the user experience of their e-commerce. With a Machine Learning algorithm, they have created a product recommender in real-time, based on previous purchases and what other people with a similar purchase profile have bought.
- They can now analyze the behavior of visitors to the website, identifying the point of abandonment, in order to optimize it.
- They also analyze the behavior of their subscribers through their online and in-store purchases.
- They have improved marketing campaigns, which for example during the pandemic allowed them to exponentially increase the number of subscribers to their newsletter, personalize offers, and therefore improve their results.
- They can perform predictive analysis of demand, optimize the logistics chain by analyzing where warehouses are located, and based on the geographical distribution of their customers.
- They can perform financial and profitability analyses per store and per product line for cost optimization.
Thanks to Google Cloud, Camper now has a new data structure that provides it, with numerous advantages. The company is ready to adapt to changes that may arise both now and in the future.
