Southeast furniture retailer completes digital transformation
Florida-based City Furniture is now running all operations on a single, standardized data platform.
The regional furniture retailer has deployed a data virtualization platform from Denodo to enable an enterprise-wide digital transformation. As a result, City Furniture has been able to virtualize all of its data sources and create a semantic layer to connect and deliver critical data to its marketing, sales, operations, supply chain, and merchandising functions, with an eye toward growing the business beyond the state of Florida.
Starting as a small family business, City Furniture has grown to become an online retailer with a chain of physical stores in Florida, reaching annual sales of $1 billion dollars. During this business transformation, the company encountered challenges with slow and inefficient traditional data management technologies.
City Furniture decided to overcome these challenges by implementing a data virtualization infrastructure to create an enterprise-wide logical data fabric. By deploying Denodo technology as the basis of its digital transformation strategy, the retailer has been able to create a standardized data access layer for all of its data sources, both on-premises and cloud.
In addition, the company can now minimize the movement and replication of data, user privacy, and compliance. It can also enable corporate technology users to deploy their business intelligence solutions of choice, as well as provide a “single source of truth” for every business function and automate its DevOps processes.
Tactically, the transformation project has enabled City Furniture to deliver 40 new reports that are full of actionable production insight, which the company says are driving better business decisions, as well as increasing its market share.
Another regional retail chain, Wisconsin-based grocer Festival Foods, is also looking to sustain fast-paced growth by unifying all of its corporate data into a single source. Festival Foods is implementing the Symphony RetailAI Master Data Management solution to help drive productivity with simplified vendor onboarding and the ability for suppliers to manage their data and collaborate within the shared insights platform. Festival Foods will streamline its data input, with enforced requirements and formatting standards to ensure accuracy and eliminate errors. The grocer will also be able to capture more data attributes than before.
“By leveraging the Denodo platform, we’re now able to connect data much faster so data consumers across the organization can drive business intelligence and advanced analytics,” said Ryan Fattini, director of data engineering at City Furniture. “After a proof-of-concept deployment in early 2020, and as COVID-19 began to spread across the country, we quickly realized that data virtualization was a crucial technology to aid our paradigm shift of becoming a data-driven business.”
“It’s a common tale these days; business growth often spurs digital transformation, but organizations continue to struggle with connecting valuable data strewn across multiple locations,” said Ravi Shankar, senior VP and chief marketing officer at Denodo. “However, this has not stopped companies like City Furniture to adopt modern data integration technologies like the Denodo Platform to accelerate their digital transformation.”
City Furniture operates 20 showrooms from Miami through Vero Beach, and in southwest and central Florida, as well as 13 Ashley HomeStore showrooms as the brand’s Southeast and Southwest Florida licensee.