Synalia is a cooperative of entrepreneurial jewelers with four banners: Julien Dorcel, Les Guildes des Orfèvres, Heure et Montres and Parfait Alibi. Our cooperative brings together 250 members who manage 450 points of sale and generate annual sales of 245 million euros. Very early on, we needed to manage, analyze and exploit a myriad of financial and commercial information from the various members. To this end, our cooperative acts as a purchasing and supplier reference center, negotiating rates for the group. Not only communications, but also a sales team of field representatives, financial services and commercial management are pooled.
In 2000, we opted for AGT Retail, a business intelligence solution tailored to retail networks, with which the publisher is very familiar. This tool provides access to summaries and analyses of financial and commercial activity, both for the network as a whole and for each entity. It also offers a multi-dimensional simulation and analysis tool, providing us with a more refined reading grid and greater responsiveness. In fact, our member stores are now compared by brand, by region, by sales and by month, to produce projections that Synalia can use to steer the company as closely as possible to set objectives. To achieve this, the tool was parameterized around a set of filters defined with us to launch statistical queries on the consolidated information. This original project made it possible to set up a central database, grouping together the accounting documents of the various sales outlets. The cooperative thus benefits from an overall visibility in which the various stores are classified by sales bracket, evaluated and compared.
Today, we're working on moving Synalia's reporting and treasury tool to Saas mode.
The aim is to enable each member store to access the database via a simple Internet connection to consult its own data. This step opens up a new dimension in the mutualization of our network, insofar as until now we were the only ones able to consult the data in the database.
Source: Revue Echanges published September 2012
