Prism Case Study: ProMarket

ProMarket selected the SiSense Prism for its retail chain's POS reporting and analytics because it delivered on all the company's requirements at a much lower total cost of ownership than alternative solutions.

What is ProMarket?

ProMarket is one of the fastest growing chains of retail stores in Bulgaria. The company currently manages 25 convenience stores in the city of Sofia and has plans to expand its network to 100 stores in the coming years. ProMarket, with its team of over 500 employees, is rapidly gaining popularity due to competitive pricing, excellent customer service and shopping innovations (e.g., in 2010, ProMarket introduced Bulgaria’s first self-service checkout counters).

What business needs was ProMarket looking to solve when they came across Prism?

ProMarket required timely and accurate reporting and analysis of key metrics, such as sales, inventory, profit by product category, spoilage, optimal order quantities for each store and many more.

How was ProMarket trying to address these needs before implementing Prism?

ProMarket was struggling to process very large amounts of data (over 40 million rows of data) from the company’s centralized database. The data processing, transformation and analytics were extremely time- and labor-consuming. Furthermore, it was impossible to generate some of the analytics required by management.

What other solutions did ProMarket evaluate before selecting Prism?

Business partners of two leading BI vendors demonstrated their BI solutions to ProMarket and provided implementation proposals to the company.

Why did ProMarket select Prism over the alternatives?

• The analytic results provided by SiSense Prism fully met the requirements of ProMarket management.
• Reports and dashboards could be customized with Prism much more quickly than with the other products.
• The data processing speed demonstrated Prism (processing over 40 million data records) was impressive.
• Prism’s total cost of ownership (implementation + software licensing) is a fraction of the costs associated with the alternatives.

How was the Prism implementation carried out?

A project management team of two ProMarket managers was formed, and they worked in close cooperation with the implementation team of Mistral Software (a system integrator and major supplier of comprehensive POS solutions to the retail and tourism industries).

The Prism integration project took 10 days (not including the prior two-week project during which Mistral Software planned, in detail, the analytics required by ProMarket).

A server was bought for the purposes of the BI project (cost: EUR 1500).

How is ProMarket using Prism to solve its business needs today?

Prism presents the managers of each store in the chain with a comprehensive view of the commercial activity and events occurring in each store. It takes only a few minutes to update the 30 specific analytic reports and dashboards so that they are continuously available to the management in both tabular and graphic forms.

What are the greatest business benefits that ProMarket is enjoying with Prism?

• Fast acquisition of systemized information at the touch of a button allows the managers to make timely and efficient decisions (the results of the most complex analytics appear within around 20 seconds).
• Ongoing updates of the summarized and systemized information, along with an intuitive user interface, enables timely and informed managerial decision-making throughout the day.

What do ProMarket's Prism users have to say about the product?

Prism is a perfect solution for our reporting and analytics needs, at a price point far below the alternatives. The analytics department employees really like the product and find it easy to use.
–Teodora Samokovska, Owner, ProMarket

Prism’s data processing capabilities are impressive, and from what I’ve observed so far, I expect it to easily handle our rapidly-growing volumes of data into the future.
–Anatoli Minkov, Technical Director, ProMarket