Rutland Cycling

Client: Rutland Cycling
Industry: B2C Retail
Project Location: Rutland
What we did: Data integration and business intelligence

Rutland Cycling are an independent, family-run chain of cycle shops, based in central England. Established in 1981, we now have 14 shops, including Britain’s biggest bike shop at Whitwell, Rutland Water; two Giant brand stores; a Specialized Concept Store in Nottingham; and more shops at Grafham Water, Fineshade Wood, Pitsford Water, Peterborough and Cambridge, as well as two state-of-the-art new stores in Milton Keynes and Leicester.

We’re proud to have won many industry awards, including the Family Business Award for Retail Excellence (2015), Best Independent Cycling Retailer (2014, 2013, 2011, 2010), and to be nominated for Best Mainstream Retailer in 2018 and Best Omnichannel Retailer in 2019.

Reason for change 
“Rutland Cycling is a growing business and we wanted to become a data driven organisation BUT the data we needed access to was held in operational and legacy systems with no easy access.” Says Mark Gilbert, Finance Director.

The business wanted to use its data assets as a key information source for managing the business on a day to day basis as well as providing a decision support platform for medium and long-term planning. We collect Data in many sources including: Finance, CRM, Telephone, Rental management and e-commerce applications. 

Mark continues “Resorting to huge data dumps, usually into Excel, managing a myriad of spreadsheets and trying to extract what the data was actually telling us was time-consuming and unreliable, we needed to change”. 

The Vision 

Seamless data to power growth. 

To establish a comprehensive, easy-to-use modern decision support platform that accesses the disparate data sources and provides the ability to integrate, interrogate and visualise this data. 

To deliver this Vision Rutland went out to tender for a qualified Microsoft Partner with extensive data integration and PowerBI skills. From this tendering exercise Village Software Engineering, a Microsoft GOLD partner, was chosen to deliver the full requirement. 

The Solution

Village Software Engineering designed and built a SQL Server data warehouse to host data from the key business data sources; Finance, CRM, Telephone, Rental management and e-commerce.  

Village utilise the Azure Cloud platform for the solution including Azure data factory for data integration/ETL.  

Extensive reporting and business analytics is provided by the Microsoft PowerBI service from the data warehouse and covers the business areas of: 

  • Executive dash-boarding 
  • Commercial and product analytics 
  • Stores management 
  • Logistics and warehousing 
  • Supplier analysis 
  • Telephone analytics incl. VOIP  
  • Customer analysis 

The Benefits 
Rutland’s Mark Gilbert states “We’ve been so pleased with the solution from Village Software and the results have really changed the way we work with benefits that include:”

  • Easy migration from our legacy Finance system to full ERP 
  • Saving of 1.5 work-days per week in report preparation 
  • Concise analytics across all our business services 
  • Empowering our departmental managers with self-service reporting and analysis 
  • Curtailed “Anecdotal decision making” – we now have the facts 

“Village have been easy to work with, taking time to understand the complexity of our business and adopting a flexible approach. It is essential for change to be successful that the business users are on-board. The solution delivered has won the approval of our users!"

- Mark Gilbert, Finance Director at Rutland Cycling

About Village
Village Software Engineering design and build incredible software solutions with the single aim of improving your business.

 Our team of innovative and skilled developers work across many sectors including: Manufacturing Education, transportation and logistics, Healthcare, Utilities and Retail. We provide application development, enterprise integration and business intelligence software solutions that embrace leading edge technologies and methods. We are a Microsoft Gold Partner. 

We apply curiosity and intelligent thinking to deliver quality solutions supported by exceptional customer care. 

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