Mark’s is a leading apparel retailer located in Calgary, Alberta and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Canadian Tire Corporation Limited employing thousands of people across Canada. ​​​​​​​Mark’s grew at a rapid pace to revenues of more than a billion dollars and essentially outgrew its back-end. The IT infrastructure constraint was holding the business back. A transformation was essential to provide the platform for the next level of growth and deliver a compelling in-store and internet experience to fight off growing competition from the e-commerce sector. ​

The Mark’s Senior Management Team wanted an improvement in the provision of accurate, real-time pricing and inventory information for swift decision making. They highlighted latency and data integrity as particular pain points but recognized that the applications concerned were tightly coupled with point-to-point interfaces involving multiple processing like Real Time, Near Real Time and Batch. In parallel, Mark’s decided to consolidate the number of partners to better align IT and software service provision with the business growth plans.

Mark’s partnered with Ness because of their proven experience within other Canadian Tire business units. They adopted Agile Business Intelligence. Mark’s initiated the internal ‘Stronger’ program aimed at revenue growth, margin improvement, inventory turns and compliance. Ness was specifically engaged in the ‘Single Truth’ sub-program aimed at providing a single source of trust worthy information to allow consistent management & operational reporting across the enterprise.

The solution involved shifts in the application integration patterns and data architecture standards and covered:

1. Building an​ MDR (metadata repository) based on ARTS data architecture

2. Building a Data mart leveraging retail analytical structure (Quantisense)

3. Introducing standard data governance including data stewardship and definition

4. Increased stability and quality with data movement (interface hardening)

The results of the program were:

• Single source for all users to access all retail information

• Reduction of manual effort

• Reducing complexity and maintenance costs

• Ensuring the correct data is reached at the end user for accurate reports for analysis

• Adopting Agile Business Intelligence as the development methodology to introduce greater visibility and value to the business