Calvin Klein Maker to Utilize Island Pac BI Solution
August 7, 2012 Alex Woodie
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PVH Corp., the clothing giant that owns and markets iconic brands such as Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, is augmenting its IBM i-based merchandise management system with Island Pacific‘s Data Warehouse, the software company announced recently. Based in New York City, PVH Corp. is one of the largest apparel companies in the world, and owns and markets some of the most well-known brands in the business. In addition to the brands mentioned above, it also owns IZOD, ARROW, Bass and G.H. Bass & Co., and its licensed brands, including Geoffrey Beene, Kenneth Cole New York, Kenneth Cole Reaction, MICHAEL Michael Kors, Sean John, Chaps, Donald J. Trump Signature Collection, JOE Joseph Abboud, DKNY, Ike Behar, and John Varvatos. The $5.7 billion company has been running the Island Pacific’s flagship IPMS package for 22 years, which is almost as long as the AS/400 has been around. While IPMS makes a great transactional system, the solution didn’t provide the level of flexibility that PVH required in its real-time reporting system. Luckily, Island Pacific had another solution that was designed from the get-go for business intelligence workloads. Island Pacific Data Warehouse (IPDW) implements a multi-dimensional database that users can query from the comfort of Microsoft Excel. The software combines data from multiple transactional systems into a single cube that can be used to generate reports, dashboards, and key performance indicators (KPIs), and also accessed remotely from mobile devices. The software, which Island Pacific OEMs from Infodepth, a British developer of business intelligence solutions for retailers, keeps data segmented into daily, weekly, monthly and yearly views, and enables queries down to the store, employee, and individual transaction levels. The software runs on a Windows Server and SQL Server backend, and is pre-integrated with IPMS and its DB2/400 data store. IPDW caught the eye of PVH in large part due to its mobile interface. “PVH searched for a flexible application to permit our management to observe and react to daily business KPIs by using smart phones and tablets,” Eileen Mahoney, group vice president for retail IT applications at PVH, stated in a press release. “IPDW facilitates timely and critical business information to the ever changing demands of our business and all criteria can be easily changed and captured for analysis.” IPDW also includes a shrink detection and analysis module designed to detect what Island Pacific terms the “ever increasing shrink” problem. (Shrink is an industry term that means inventory stolen by employees.) The IPDW Shrink Module helps to identify employees, transactions, and cards that are the highest risk for shrinkage, and even has a real-time shrink engine that notifies managers immediately upon detection of possible theft.
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