Jaeger is a world class, contemporary British fashion and lifestyle brand with a rich history and dynamic future built on womenswear, menswear and accessories. Jaeger wanted to create a data driven business and had to get their underlying architecture right to deliver the various initiatives and projects the business wanted.

Challenge: creating a data-driven business

UK-based fashion brand and retailer Jaeger is respected for its innovation and creativity: from the first brand to use wool as a summer fabric to more recent collaborations and collections. In technology terms, however, Jaeger wanted to do more. The company had a legacy on-premises operational ERP system and data warehouse that was increasingly slow, difficult to maintain and limited in functionality for business intelligence to support decision-making. In addition, changes and additions could take a long time to implement on the legacy system, stretching the in-house IT team and diverting staff from more value added activity. The opportunity was to create a more data-driven business to support ambitious growth plans; a modern architecture including new levels of master data management (MDM) to link all the critical data Jaeger required for faster and more informed decision-making. “Our pitch to the Board was around delivering a modern data architecture,” says Cathy McCabe, CIO. “We understood how limiting our legacy system was, in terms of our capability to do things quickly to help drive the business forward. A number of business initiatives depended on technology. How could we deliver them? A project might take 80 days, 100 days, 150 days, and we only had capacity to handle one at a time. We needed a next-generation data warehouse, and our strategic business initiatives around data and analytics meant considering the wider IT landscape: creating the right foundations to give us thecapability to be more agile, to plug-in different platforms, solutions, products or channels. It was an opportunity to change how we worked.” Jaeger engaged Datalytyx to help plan and deliver the optimal approach.

Solution: Datalytyx, Talend and AWS Redshift

Jaeger considered various solutions before focusing on Talend. “A partner suggested talking to Datalytyx,” McCabe continues. “We’d chosen Talend and wanted further support. Our BI project had also gained Board approval. Datalytyx not only had the Talend expertise but also brought Amazon Redshift to the table. That was the Datalytyx approach: forward thinking, evaluatingwhat was right for Jaeger, then making recommendations. Talend is brilliant as our ETL and data transformation tool, absolutely right for what we wanted, with a really strong MDM process. Amazon Redshift also delivers precisely what we want; it’s performant and scalable. Datalytyx worked in an advisory capacity then project managed implementation.”Datalytyx confirmed then implemented Talend Data Fabric to simplify and accelerate data cleansing and aggregation, plus an Amazon Redshift hosted solution to deliver a high performance petabyte-scale data warehouse in the cloud. Up to 7 years of granular historical data from Jaeger’s legacy operational data store (400 million rows) was quickly migrated. “The Datalytyx team was responsible for 90% of the first phase, with my team gradually up-skilling so we can be self-reliant,” McCabe adds. Jaeger can now unlock its existing data, enrich it with new data, manage all data better, and become a more data-driven enterprise.

Benefits: ‘Changing how we work’

With data extracted from operational systems daily or hourly compared to weekly with the former system, and external data including footfall traffic and website traffic via Google Analytics, Jaeger has a modern data warehouse available 24/7 and at a reduced total cost of ownership -with the flexibility to add additional data sources without limitation. Sales insight is produced hourly, with other data available including stock balances, product, cost, pricing, markdown and purchase orders. The new insights are helping support international growth plans while optimising individual retail outlets. The cloud-based nature not only enabled deployment in weeks plus easy scalability based on demand, the minimal capital expenditure meant greatly reduced risk compared to a traditional on-premises solution. McCabe says the new approach “enables closer alignment between IT and the business. Whatever we want to do as a business, there’s typically a technology requirement. In some organisations, there’s not always a tight coupling between IT and the business. That’s not true here: we’re perceived as far more than just a ‘service provider’. This new approach was essential for Jaeger. We had to move forward in this way, in the pursuit of success, and our solution ticks all the boxes. We’ve already brought across 60-70% of the data, and we’re moving into the next phase. That will involve looking at the customer more deeply: bringing in behaviour data and moving into more complex analytics, exploring customer demand and other areas.”