Get to Know babymarkt
Babymarkt is the largest baby and children’s products, supplies, clothing, and toys e-tailer in Europe, netting €220M ($223M USD) in global sales throughout 2021. Headquartered in Germany, babymarkt boasts an average annual revenue growth rate exceeding 30% across its business, which includes online retail stores in 14 European countries and China and brick-and-mortar stores in 5 cities.
The Challenge
Historically, babymarkt relied on a centralized IT function within its parent company, the Tengelmann Group, to deliver its technical needs. The central IT team had developed a homegrown solution for data analytics maintained by a large group of employees. When another brand within the Group was spun off, babymarkt needed to rapidly replace the reporting infrastructure that the team had custom-built and used for its grocery retail use cases.
The Solution
The significantly smaller babymarkt team originally considered adopting the Group’s homegrown reporting solution but ultimately decided that its total cost of ownership was too high. Its legacy system had too many known limitations, was cumbersome to maintain, and simply “didn’t feel like the future.” After evaluating Power BI and Qlik, babymarkt ultimately selected MicroStrategy as its enterprise analytics platform where it integrates and models data from its ERP system and Oracle DWH—standardizing reporting for the entire business.
The Impact
MicroStrategy reports now deliver the timely, trusted information that team members across babymarkt leverage to power their day-to-day work. Today, data analytics powered by a sole enterprise analytics platform delivers insights for enabling every core business function, spanning financial controlling, channel marketing, order fulfillment, customer experience management, and more.
"Data is essential to everything we do. We adopted MicroStrategy as our single BI solution because it streamlines self-service while also offering a host of modern features to enhance our business users’ experience. Best of all, the underlying semantic structure allows us to build data quality assurance right into our foundation, so our entire audience can trust the insights we deliver—and ultimately use that information to drive results for the business.”
Jan Friedemeyer
Head of BI, babymarkt
Use Cases
The babymarkt team leverages 100+ weekly reports to deliver results across more than a dozen core functions.
Inventory Optimization
Merchandising, purchasing, and procurement professionals leverage data to forecast customer buying patterns and optimize ordering— ensuring the right products are on-hand at the right times and in the right quantities.
Digital Advertising
Product and channel marketing professionals apply data analytics to establish optimized promotion strategies for its comprehensive product catalog, build and execute digital campaigns, and achieve peak CPC performance from social and Google ads—all while recommending top products targeted to customers’ unique needs at competitive prices.
Order Fulfillment
Service and support professionals use data to manage the customer experience from order placement to delivery, optimizing the fulfillment prediction timelines and shipping processes for each country’s market—which has led to 4.8 out of 5 stars on eKomi.
The Approach
Babymarkt opted for a two-phased approach when adopting MicroStrategy. Due to system change timelines, it first implemented a total replacement of its existing reports. Leveraging the semantic graph underlying the platform, it established a governed schema that standardized business logic and data relationships across all business needs. It then established data refresh rules and report distribution schedules to deliver all reports to end users. During the second phase of its implementation, the team opened up the platform to select users for self-service analytics and designed holistic, modern, and intuitive applications that empower its broader audience with MicroStrategy Dossier.
The Results
Through the trusted partnership and productive cooperation babymarkt established with MicroStrategy, the team accomplished three primary objectives. It replaced its legacy solution, established data governance to ensure accuracy, and enabled users across its business to effectively leverage 100+ weekly reports - ensuring the continued growth and success of its business.