Camper takes the sales of footwear one step ahead – through advanced collaboration and data analytics

Boosting stores and corporate offices collaboration

Camper teams across the organisation, including product design, manufacturing, marketing, and distribution rely upon each other to complete projects on budget and on schedule. However, the localised and segmented approach to managing information and communication had made teamwork a challenge. The outdated legacy collaboration suite, in particular, made it very difficult for employees to share information and support each other.

We knew we could modernise and improve how our teams communicate and collaborate by moving to a cloud solution. With its ease of use and track record, Google Workspace was the clear choice for us. 

– Cristina Frontera Rossello, Business Technology Project Manager, Camper

Camper took a focused approach to rolling out Google Workspace. To test solutions and ensure successful rollouts, the company turned to SoftwareOne for support.

“SoftwareOne and Google Workspace allow us to identify solutions and quickly validate they will work to meet our needs,” says Cristina. “Google Workspace’s flexibility and scalability, combined with SoftwareOne’s expertise, give us tremendous confidence about the success of adopting the collaboration tools company-wide.”

During the migration process, Camper discovered additional opportunities for digitising and streamlining outdated processes, significantly reducing time spent on repetitive manual administrative tasks.

One of the primary objectives of the early migration phase was to enhance collaboration between Camper's corporate offices and stores. To achieve this part of the project, SoftwareOne collaborated with Camper to develop a dedicated application utilising Calendar, Drive, and Google Photos. This application facilitated efficient management of events and tasks, allowing corporate teams to communicate specific instructions about product placement in stores, while enabling stores to provide real-time performance updates.

Thanks to our improved collaboration, we can obtain and analyse performance data faster to understand which initiatives or projects are working well and put them on the market more quickly. Our projects are having greater impacts in shorter amounts of time.

– Cristina Frontera Rossello, Business Technology Project Manager, Camper

Camper also uses Google Sites which serves as a hub keeping information centralised and accessible to all stores, including training, product details, retail calendars, and Google reviews.

Our corporate offices and stores now work more closely and efficiently together. Across all our groups, people are sharing information and collaborating faster than ever thanks to Google Workspace and SoftwareOne.

– Cristina Frontera Rossello, Business Technology Project Manager, Camper

Transforming into a data-driven business

With the move to Google Workspace providing an immediate productivity boost, Camper wanted to become more data-driven but needed to modernise its existing data architecture. The local database server, which served as the data warehouse, was limited in terms of scalability, accessibility and integration of different data sources and did not provide a comprehensive overview of the information needed for informed decision-making.

To overcome these challenges, SoftwareOne supported Camper in developing a customised solution in the Google Cloud. The key approach was to democratise all data and create a scalable structure that provides centralised and combined access to all relevant information, while creating the basis for developing predictive models to anticipate the market.

Camper's data journey began with the creation of a data lake, feeding data from various systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), analytics, customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation, eCommerce, logistics and email marketing tools. Using the Google ecosystem, the data was migrated and stored in BigQuery and Google Cloud Storage, giving Camper a centralised and scalable data solution.

With BigQuery as its unified data repository, Camper gains valuable insights into its retail strategies to attract customers to shop in-store and online. Consolidating data sources has eliminated information silos, allowing Camper to analyse information from all applications at once, rather than having to analyse data from each separately. SoftwareOne helped Camper create workflows to upload data into BigQuery in a timely manner and replicate it as needed to ensure system accuracy across systems.

By leveraging Looker Studio for visualisation, loyalty data captured in a store can now be shared with other stores across the globe via dashboards to share insights on customer behaviour and retail performance.

SoftwareOne’s support unlocked the power of BigQuery and greatly reduced how much manual work is needed to access and analyse our data.

– Cristina Frontera Rossello, Business Technology Project Manager, Camper

The new strategy replaced localised, manual data entry processes to capture information on individual store performance, including special offers, as well as other key transactional and customer-facing information. Previously, it was problematic or even impossible for staff in corporate offices to gain this insight efficiently, as each department produced its own reports and used different criteria.

With SoftwareOne’s guidance and the use of BigQuery, we removed obstacles that prevented our in-store and corporate teams from sharing information effectively. This has been a big success. We’re now even better at setting sales goals and increasing in-store sales.

– Cristina Frontera Rossello, Business Technology Project Manager in Camper 

With Looker Studio as the front end of Camper's new data platform, and Google Cloud Storage and BigQuery capturing and managing that data, Camper has also seen an increase in staff productivity and faster completion of projects. Sheets serve as a source of data entry to further feed the data platform.