City Furniture Leveraged the Denodo Platform to Establish a Logical Data Fabric in Support of a Digital Transformation
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Denodo Platform
Tech Stack
- Data Virtualization
- BigQuery
- MongoDB
- MySQL
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Digital Expertise
Technology Category
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
- Analytics & Modeling - Big Data Analytics
Applicable Industries
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Sales & Marketing
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Supply Chain Visibility
- Predictive Quality Analytics
Services
- Data Science Services
About The Customer
City Furniture is a Florida-based retailer on a mission to change the way people live, with beautiful home furnishings at incredible value. City Furniture was founded in 1971 as Waterbed City, founded by Kevin Charles, and over the years the company has evolved into a leading furniture and home accents destination. Today, City Furniture represents both the City Furniture and Ashley Furniture HomeStore brands and has grown to have 16 City Furniture locations and 13 Ashley HomeStore locations throughout the state of Florida. With planned expansions throughout Southeast, Southwest, and Central Florida, City Furniture is a business focused on fast growth and exceptional service.
The Challenge
City Furniture, an online retailer with a chain of physical stores in Florida, started out as a small family business that has grown to reach annual sales of $1 billion. While the company has been experiencing rapid growth, it encountered challenges with slow, inefficient data management technologies. The company’s extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes had high resource requirements and were slow to implement, so they impeded many important data initiatives. In addition, City Furniture’s operational and sales data systems were decentralized from the data in the transactional systems. This made it difficult to perform advanced analytics and understand operational issues such as scheduling orders, delivery delays, and returns. To grow, City Furniture needed advanced analytics to gain more visibility about deliveries, scheduling, and routing orders, and to better prepare the sales team to deliver orders. The company needed a centralized data source to provide accurate data to different teams such as sales, marketing, supply chain, and business operations, to help them make faster decisions.
The Solution
City Furniture decided to embrace data virtualization, a modern data integration and data management technology that can establish an enterprise-wide logical data fabric. City Furniture integrated the Denodo Platform, a data virtualization solution, into its data architecture as the highest-level data layer for all analytics and operational systems. City Furniture connected all data sources, from basic flat-file Excel spreadsheets, to cloud databases, to a legacy IBM iSeries server platform, to the Denodo Platform’s virtual layer. With the Denodo Platform established over the profusion of data sources, City Furniture was able to virtualize all the sources and create a universal semantic layer. Today, this data layer serves as the single data delivery layer for all analytical (Cognos BI and Power BI) and operational applications accessed by the various departments across the company.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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