Swiss Farms takes intelligent enterprise approach

Swiss Farms Stores has come a long way since it launched 50 years ago as an outlet for a local dairy to sell excess milk.



Today, the Broomall, Pennsylvania-based convenience retailer operates 13 stores on a drive-through model where customers place orders from their cars in an express lane and have items quickly delivered to them at the window. And it isn’t done growing.



“We want to expand outside our footprint and open new stores,” said Chris Grey, IT manager of Swiss Farms, in an interview with Chain Store Age. “We plan to open three to five new corporate stores in the next 18 months.”



To help ensure it can continue to function smoothly as it grows, Swiss Farms has pervasively deployed the Decision Suite business intelligence platform from Boston-based TARGIT.



“Every department uses TARGIT to manage operations and reporting,” said Grey. “It delivers dashboards to the executives. We also have a small fleet making daily deliveries to stores, and it manages the logistics system.”



TARGIT automatically generates reports that used to be handled via manual spreadsheet. Swiss Farms initially loaded historical spreadsheet data into the TARGIT data service.



“We mashed up historical data with our current retail data and delivered analysis through the organization,” said Grey.



This included valuable customer service data, such as records of customer calls or inquiries to the Swiss Farms e-commerce site. Swiss Farms selected TARGIT in part because it integrates well into the Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP platform it uses.



“We wanted analytics to give us better insight into ERP data,” said Grey. “TARGIT served as a business intelligence accelerator. We were up and running with cubes quickly. It gave us a base to work with.”



As a result of its TARGIT implementation, Swiss farms has been able to drive insights and analytics throughout the business using reports from operational databases, as opposed to having to build a data warehouse. More recently, the retailer has been using TARGIT to gain better insight into its social media activities.



“We started getting reports on our Twitter and Facebook presence,” said Grey. “We see things like retweet penetration and what goes viral. On Facebook, we’re just starting to look. There is a lot of data available.”