Category Analytics Team
IDEA Serbia
Idea is one of the largest retailers in Serbia, with over 300 stores across 80 cities it serves more than 300,000 customers every day. They had tremendous amounts of data that was generally processed by a combination of manual data extraction and further manipulation in Excel.
IDEA VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Before 11Ants, we had a lot of problems...we had a lot of data, but we were like a data rich company, but not really a data driven company, and that needed to be changed.
We had a lot of data, but the main tool that we used was Excel. Excel has a lot of limitations regarding how much data can be imported into an Excel report, so that was the main chain challenge; and usually we used a report only based on transactions, not a deep dive analysis. We solved that problem with a lot of requests to our internal IT department data - they needed to extract the data, and put the data in some Excel file, and after that we use that Excel file to make some reports. So there was a lot of manual work, and probably a lot of mistakes in that manual work. Now that is really automated.
As the role of the head of the reporting, I have information far faster than I ever had before. I have more information than I had before, and I have a really new perspective of the problem that we never had a chance to have from the previous data. We accomplished a lot of things we didn't think that we could from previous data.
The primary benefits for me as a user of 11Ants is a new perspective, faster results, and a lot of time saving. Now we've started using some tools that we never thought that we even needed before...for example, tracking the halo effect when tracking promos. In the past, we were starting some promo activities that at the end we really didn't know is, what is the final profitability of that promo? Now we have the exact information, how many customers we engaged, how many new customers, what is the final margin from the customers that buy a whole basket, not the not only the specific items in the basket. So this is like a great benefit from the implementation of 11Ants.
For me 11Ants is a tool that can give us explanations how the shopper behaves and how that behavior changes from time to time. If 11Ants was removed from our organization, it would just hurt a lot. I personally really love and enjoy using the 11Ants tool because it makes my life easier.
If I needed to recommend 11Ants, I would probably not recommend it to our competitors! Because now we think that we are on a fast track, and everybody else is on the slow track on the highway. So yes, this is like we want it only for ourselves! But for the retail industry, I think that is a really, really good tool and a lot of retailers should really have it.
