Spotlight on Rutland Cycling BI

The importance of Business Intelligence (BI) cannot be overstated. In terms of helping a business to grow and thrive, it can be transformational. 

One business that uses data and BI as a central strategy for growth is our client, Rutland Cycling. 

Rutland Cycles – A business with a data-driven vision 

Rutland Cycling focuses on selling and hiring bikes online – meaning that e-commerce is extremely important to them. Having grown organically they now have twelve retail shops, including a 10,000 square foot store in Nottingham, as well as a thriving online business. 

In recent years, their business achievements have won them two Mercury Business Awards for Best Independent Retailer and Large Business of the Year as well as the BikeBiz award for Best Omnichannel Retailer in 2020.  

Rutland Cycling improve decision making analytics using BI

“Rutland Cycling is a growing business, and we wanted to become a data-driven organization. But the data we needed access to was held in operational and legacy systems, with no easy access,” said Mark Gilbert, Rutland’s Finance Director.

Rutland asked Village Software to help them better utilise their data to improve day-to-day decision making. As with most businesses, Rutland hold data across multiple sources – including their EPOS system, customer resource management (CRM), finance software, Google Analytics, and excel spreadsheets to name but a few.

They wanted to be able to integrate all data and see one single version of the truth, in order to easily identify trends, make faster and smarter decisions, improve day to day planning and operations, and drive future growth.

Historically, their data was siloed and stored in older, legacy systems making it difficult, and time consuming to extract and analyse. Data for these reports was not always reliable.

Moving from anecdotal to data-driven decision-making 

Rutland wanted a comprehensive, easy-to-use modern decision-making platform with access to its disparate data sources – a solution that would enable them to quickly and easily integrate, analyse, and visualise trends, insights and information. 

Village Software designed and built an Microsoft SQL Server-based Azure Data Warehouse which could host Rutland’s data from the key business application data sources of finance, CRM, telephone, rental management and e-commerce. We used the Microsoft Azure cloud platform to implement this solution, including Azure Data Factory for data integration and extract, transform, and load (ETL) functions.

Power BI provides extensive reporting and business analytics, driven by the data warehouse – data which has historically been spread across legacy systems. 

With Power BI’s dashboard visualisation capabilities, Rutland executives and managers have quick and easy access to the data they need to monitor the business and guide faster, more informed decision-making.

The benefits BI is delivering for Rutland 

Rutland have completely transformed their business and are continuously improving and winning market share by being data-driven at their core. 

“We’ve been so pleased with the solution from, Village Software,” says Mark Gilbert. “The results have really changed the way we work.” 

The results? A more efficient way of working, enabling Rutland to innovate and evolve at pace. Rutland now saves 1.5 days per week in report preparation alone. Their reporting is now more reliable, concise and informed.

“Village have been easy to work with, taking time to understand the complexity of our business and adopting a flexible approach,” says Mark Gilbert.

To read Microsoft’s case study on Rutland Cycling click here.

About Village Software

Village Software Engineering design and build remarkable software solutions. We are focused on and committed to powering your business through data – improving your insights, increasing your productivity your efficiency, and reducing your costs.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we are experts in helping organisations manage their data, helping you overcome everyday data issues, and transforming your decision-making and insights.

If you would like advice or support about how to become data driven as an organisation, please get in touch.

https://villagesoftware.co.uk/

Photo by Jake Colling on Unsplash