italian eyewear maker luxottica sharpens operational view with

ITALIAN EYEWEAR MAKER
LUXOTTICA SHARPENS
OPERATIONAL VIEW WITH QLIKVIEW
“QlikView is a huge efficiency driver for processes in which decisionmaking is based on analysis of KPIs. Moreover, QlikView is a factor in
integrating processes that used to be separate. For example, it enables us
to collect data from the sales force to define and publish the commercial
forecast and allows for faster recognition and prediction of market
developments.”
– Massimo Rigobon, Responsabile BI, Luxottica Group
If the subject centered on glasses
not gowns, the perennial Academy
Awards question, “Who are you
wearing?” would very likely be
“Luxottica”—and not just for those
strutting the red carpet. The Italian
company is the world’s largest
designer, manufacturer and
seller of eyeglass frames and
sunglasses. Altogether, the Milan,
Italy-based Luxottica Group has
approximately 7,000 stores and is
behind 32 licensed designer or
house brands that range from
chic Chanels to Ray-Ban Baloramas
to Shaun White’s signature Oakley
Holbrook shades with gold-tinted
lenses. Its retail stores and
optometry centers include
LensCrafters, Pearle Vision,
Sunglass Hut and the EyeMed
Vision Care Group. On the manufacturing side, it has operations in
Italy, China, Brazil and the United
States. In 2012, net sales exceeded
€7 billion.
Founded in Agordo, Italy in 1961 with
a simple business model—a small
collection of fashionable eyeglass
frames sold to wholesalers—the
company quickly began refashioning
its own operations through a strategy
of vertical integration. In the 1970s, it
shifted from wholesale distribution to
direct distribution; in the 1980s, it
began acquiring independent
distributors and signing licensing
agreements with celebrated
designers like Giorgio Armani; and in
the 1990s, it added sunwear and
became the first eyewear
manufacturer to enter the retail
market when it acquired
LensCrafters. In 1999, Luxottica
definitively claimed global
leadership status by acquiring
Ray-Ban, the world’s best known
sunglasses. It continued its growth
trajectory throughout the 2000s,
acquiring, among others, Sunglass
Hut, the world’s biggest distributor
of premium sunglasses, Bausch &
Lomb and Oakley.
But as Luxottica grew and
changed, its business intelligence
capabilities weren’t growing
and changing with it. If it needed
reports on key performance
indicators (KPIs), for example, its
IT department would have to
assemble reports and charts from
various spreadsheets and
documents, an expensive,
laborious process. To stay on top,
the company knew it needed a
faster, more flexible and more
interactive business intelligence
platform, one that could deliver
customized, real time analysis
delivered in easy-to-absorb
presentations and dashboards.
In 2008, the group began a longrange initiative to do just that.
Although it had a comprehensive
enterprise resource planning
(ERP) system that it was happy
with, the system had no built-in
capabilities for online analytical
processing, data mining, complex
event processing, benchmarking,
text mining and other predictive
analytics. Without the ability to
swiftly and easily assemble
accurate historic, current or
predictive views of its business
operations, the eyewear maker
could potentially fail to identify or
develop new opportunities—not a
situation it wanted to invite.
SOLUTION OVERVIEW
Luxottica
Luxottica is a leader in the
design, manufacture,
distribution and sales of
premium, luxury and sports
eyewear.
Founded: 1961 Headquarters: Milan, Italy Employees: Approximately
70,000
Net Sales: EUR 7.1billion Challenges:
• Reduce effort required to
track key performance
indicators (KPIs) for the
business
• Create a faster, more
flexible, and more
interactive business
intelligence platform
• Deliver customized, real
time analysis in easy-toabsorb presentations and
dashboards
Key Benefits:
• Delivered more precise,
in-depth, and dynamic
reporting for better
decision-making and
logistics management
• Enabled monitoring of
KPIs by specific filters
such as market and time
segmentation
• Led to better planning by
making it possible for
partners to be included in
the process
• Works in concert with
existing software,
eliminating the need for a
major change in IT
infrastructure
• Enabled self-service
reporting at all levels of
the organization
QlikView Partner:
QlikView Italy
RETURN ON
INVESTMENT
1,500
staff and partners
access QlikView to
monitor business
performance and
accelerate
decision-making
TIME TO VALUE
Reduced the time
needed to produce
reports from hours
or days to
Real Time
“We’re a company with operations
on every continent that offers
hundreds of product lines and has
to integrate dozens of commercial,
logistical, financial, organizational
and operational activities,” said
Massimo Rigobon, Responsabile
BI with the Luxottica Group.
“We’re also a company that has to
compete against producers and
wholesalers.“
Global market forces have
intensified the competitive
pressure on the company. “In the
last five years, the economic and
competitive environment has
become more and more
demanding,” Rigobon said. “We
need the best possible business
intelligence to maintain our edge.”
QlikView Solution from QlikTech
ease of use and integration—was
QlikView, the comprehensive
business discovery platform from
QlikTech.
QlikView is a world leader in the
techniques of in-memory analytics
and can be used for all types of
reporting, forecasting and general
data analysis. It combines the
features of dynamic presentations,
instantaneous data manipulation
and real-time data analytics, and
supports a wide range of
application areas, including
reporting and analysis, monitoring,
scorecards, consolidation,
planning and forecasting. In
addition, it can be deployed onpremise, on cloud servers, and on
laptops and mobile devices such
as iPhones or iPads.
As much as Luxottica wanted the
online analytical processing, data
mining, complex event processing,
benchmarking, text mining and
other predictive analytics of a
business intelligence solution, it
did not want to scrap its existing
ERP system to get those
capabilities. Instead, it wanted an
add-on solution that would not only
work with its own internal ERP
system but would be easy to
integrate with the preferred
systems of its many partners.
Luxottica’s first foray into
uncovering the capabilities of
QlikView began in its commercial
department, where it developed a
forecasting solution to support the
sales force. The platform was so
successful that Luxottica rolled it
out to corporate top management
and numerous other departments
including finance, logistics,
marketing, human resources and
research and development. By the
end of 2012, Luxottica had 1,500
users on QlikView, 1,200 of them
international sales staff.
“The ERP system we were using
was not intended to provide
dashboards and business
intelligence,” Rigobon said. “It was
our belief that the biggest gains
were to be found in solutions using
in-memory analysis and reporting.
Such solutions bring simplicity,
flexibility and scalability, even in
the most ambitious BI projects.”
“QlikView plays an important role
within the management processes
of the company,” Rigobon
acknowledged. “After being
introduced to monitor day-to-day
performance of the sales force,
QlikView has been subsequently
adopted in almost every
department to support information
delivery and decision-making.”
After looking at several solutions,
the one that met all of Luxottica’s
criteria—for capabilities, price and
QlikView Italy, a QlikView Master
Reseller, was instrumental in
designing, testing, and deploying
an innovative analytics platform
across Luxottica’s operations.
“Luxottica offered the opportunity
for building a solution that would
generate real business value and
optimize sales across multiple
global markets,” said Massimo
San Giuseppe, CEO of QlikView
Italy.
Speed, Ease and Customization
Fast response was a top goal for
the company’s BI software. In the
past, it took anywhere from hours
to days for the eyewear maker’s IT
staff to cull through all the spread-
sheets and data points needed
to create a viable report. With
QlikView, reports can be
assembled in real time.
Furthermore, with QlikView, end
users are given presentations on
an interactive software program
that allows them to enter new
data on the dashboard or simply
move saved data around so they
can see the same set of data
from different viewpoints on the
same presentation. In essence,
QlikView creates real-time,
customized presentations by
allowing end users to move and
change data within it instantly.
High Marks from Staff
“In the last five years, the
economic and competitive
environment has become more
and more demanding. We need
the best possible business
intelligence to maintain our
edge.”
– Massimo Rigobon, Responsabile BI,
Luxottica Group
Luxottica’s users universally
report high levels of satisfaction
with the solution. “On the front
end, users like the easy usability
and speed,” Rigobon continued.
“On the back end, they like the
presence of a statistical AQL
engine like the ones at the heart
of major search engines. This
gives us the ability to build
flexible, made-to-order solutions
and prepare filters and make
them available to end-users.”
Some 1,500 people now use the
platform, 1,200 of them sales
staff. “That’s quite a high
number of users,” Rigobon said.
“We attribute that to the high
ease of use.”
Democratizing Intelligence
Within a few months after it was
installed, QlikView is supporting
almost all of the applications that
power Luxottica’s business
functions: management, human
resources, logistics, finance,
retail, quality control, after-sales,
marketing, IT, purchasing and
research and development.
Furthermore, access is open to
any employee or partner who
needs country- or store-specific
information. “Users come from
all over the world and belong to
all organizational levels, from top
management to sales staff,”
Rigobon confirmed. “Units in the
United States, Canada, France
and Italy now have specific,
custom-made solutions.”
Higher Productivity, Greater
Efficiency
Before moving to QlikView,
requests for ad hoc queries and
analysis were routed through
Luxottica’s IT department. Now
that individual users can run
their own self-designed and selfservice queries, Luxottica’s IT
staff and developers can attend
to other high-priority work.
“For the IT department, QlikView
has provided a self-service BI
solution that frees the
developers to manage important
administrative tasks like data
integration and user access
rights management rather than
address the constant requests
from individual users.”
Although the eyewear maker
has yet to put a monetary value
on the productivity gains derived
from this, it considers the
capabilities to be beneficial in
their own right. “It’s not just the
time savings that help the
company, it’s also the new
functionalities that can be
performed,” Rigobon confirmed.
“QlikView is a huge efficiency
driver for processes in which
decision-making is based on
analysis of KPIs,” he continued.
“Moreover, QlikView is a factor
in integrating processes that
used to be separate. For
example, it enables us to collect
data from the sales force to
define and publish the
commercial forecast and allows
for faster recognition and
prediction of market
developments.”
The Way of the Future
As Luxottica looks ahead to the
possibility of expanding to new
markets in India, the Middle East
and Thailand—and to keeping
the world looking good while
seeing well—it plans to make
QlikView a cornerstone of its
operations. “QlikView is deemed
to be the best solution to read
and understand quantitative
performances as well to control
the various KPIs in our data
warehouse,” Rigobon said. “We
see QlikView’s dashboards as
the quantitative and
informational underpinning for
decision support companywide.”
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