Signet Jewelers deploys Tableau and Alteryx to transform its data community and support its “path to brilliance”

Signet Jewelers is an international jewelry retailer operating more than 3,000 stores, including Zales, Kay Jewelers, and Jared, in the US, UK, and Canada. In today's ever-changing retail landscape, Signet works tirelessly to keep pace with evolving consumer buying patterns, remain responsive to ecommerce trends, and optimize physical stores to maximize sales. Signet wanted to take advantage of its vast amounts of consumer retail data—a principal advantage it wields over the smaller stores that represent much of its competition—all while reducing its operational spend on IT deployment and maintenance projects.

When it came to data, historically, departments functioned mostly in silos and had varying knowledge of what was actually happening in the field. This led to a rise in “shadow IT” with various business groups standing up independent data solutions using their own vendors. Among other issues, this put a burden on the IT team to learn and understand these many disparate systems in order to provide more centralized support. IT's focus became more reactive than proactive—always taking time to address the immediate issues, leaving less time to strategize long-term and company-wide.

Signet's IT team consolidated data into a new enterprise data warehouse (EDW), which users connect to using Alteryx to prepare the data for consumption. The team then built a series of starter dashboards in Tableau to create a comprehensive view of the business, starting in the real estate business unit, where quicker access to information now enables greater agility and flexibility with lease negotiations. As more people accessed these dashboards through Tableau Cloud (powered by AWS), news began to spread across the company. Over the course of two years, Tableau adoption continued to grow and KPI dashboards now get thousands of views. For example, the business planning team leverages Tableau to quickly compare revenue versus forecast for millions of SKUs in seconds. The merchandising team uses Tableau to give merchants near-real-time access to stock inventory and merchandise popularity data.

This new analytics deployment with Tableau has yielded many benefits. Signet has seen reduced time-to-market, lower IT overhead costs, and created more self-service analytics capabilities. In the case of one maintenance dashboards, using Tableau saved Signet more than $250,000 by transforming the team's ability to find data patterns. Elsewhere, using Tableau to analyze more than 75 million point-of-sale transactions led to identifying an opportunity worth more than $10 million. Providing strategic insights in hours rather than days or weeks has also transformed decision making at Signet and enabled leadership to take swift corrective action during key selling periods. While centralizing much of Signet's data into the new EDW, Signet's use of Tableau has also empowered the individual departments to have more autonomy in building and maintaining their own dashboards.

The newly-formed Enterprise Analytics team, which grew out of early innovations of the real estate division, meets regularly with each department to advise and consult on data projects using Tableau. It also hosts a Data Governance Committee where IT gains new insights into business strategy and the analytics team socializes new technologies like Tableau and Alteryx. In addition, the team has built an Analytics Center of Excellence that holds quarterly meetings to showcase various dashboards and help departments share best practices with one another.

Using Tableau to help build this data-focused culture, where every employee can be a citizen data scientist, has contributed to the success of Signet's “Path to Brilliance”—a commitment to be customer-first and omnichannel, and to achieve a culture of agility and efficiency.