McArthurGlen now use Retail Advantage ™ as the primary business reporting tool across their entire portfolio.
McArthurGlen is Europe’s leading developer, owner and manager of designer outlet villages since introducing outlet retailing to Europe in 1995. Its current portfolio of 19 well-located designer outlet villages across the UK and Continental Europe comprises 500,000 sq m of retail space, housing over 750 brands, including some of Europe’s top names in fashion, in 2,000 stores. McArthurGlen’s centres are visited annually by nearly 75 million people. Since mid-2009, the group has opened new designer outlets in Berlin, Salzburg and Naples with additional new projects due to open in 2011/2012 in Athens and Hamburg.
In 2005 McArhurGlen made the decision to streamline the way in which they communicated and reported information between head office, centres and tenants. The key requirements identified were:
- Improve the speed in which data can be collected and collated from tenants
- Improve the quality of the data collected by minimising human error
- Reduce the time taken to create reports essential to the business
- Improve the communication between head office, centres and their stores
At all levels throughout the business at McArthurGlen everybody now has access to critical business information in real time and at the click of a button. Reports that would have previously taken many days to compile can now be created in a matter of minutes.
“The web-based system has proven to be hugely powerful to all users with the flexibility to log on anywhere to view and input data. The major benefits lie around the information that we can give back to our tenants and shareholders. We are now able to quickly provide much more detailed and valuable information on a centre-by-centre basis. Within two or three clicks the tenants, admin staff, head office and investors are able to monitor many aspects of each centre’s performance, Europe-wide.
The process is much simpler now for both the administrators and the tenants and time isn’t wasted. This definitely gives McArthurGlen a competitive advantage" - Hubs Bakshi, McArthurGlen
Working closely with Applied Relational Technology McArthurGlen has used Retail Advantage ™ (RA) to create a complete retail extranet to facilitate their reporting and communication requirements. In 2010 it now serves 21 centres and more than 2500 users across the McArthurGlen portfolio with 3 new centres scheduled to open by the end of 2011.
One area key to the McArthurGlen’s business is the collection and processing of sales data from every tenant in all their centres. Prior to implementing RA they were facing an ever increasing difficulty to ensure this process would run effectively. On a weekly basis each tenant was collating the data generated on sales in their store with it taking up to three administration staff at each centre an entire day to check and double check hundreds of figures. This system was extremely limited and heavily reliant on manual paper based transmission of information and the manipulation of several complex spreadsheets. In addition they regularly had to phone or visit tenants to amend mistakes and the process was inconvenient, slow and extremely costly.
After a successful trial in one of the UK centres the decision was quickly made to roll out the Retail Advantage ™ to all of their centres. By the end of 2006 the system was in use in every centre across the UK and Europe and now the system has become an essential tool to the business.
Despite a slight apprehension initially from both the tenants and on-site centre staff the benefits from this new method of operation were seen almost immediately. With dramatic savings in time the sales information being gathered was more accurate andbeing processed much more quickly than before freeing administrative staff up to get on their other vital roles within the business. This improved efficiency in the collection and reporting of information also allowed McArhurGlen to make to decision to start collecting data not on a weekly basis but every day. This process would have been impossible to implement without Retail Advantage ™ and now offers new levels of reporting and analysis that was simply unachievable before.
