News and Events

Business Intelligence Goes Live at HFT:

10/12/08

Harbor Freight Tools, the California-based tools and general merchandise retailer, has successfully implemented Retail Express’ AMP2 pricing and promotions product and with it the recently released AMP2 Data Marts and the Business Intelligence (BI) layer powered by MicroStrategy.

Retail Express has built a market-leading intelligent merchandising application, AMP2, which gives retailers the ability to manage all aspects of the planning and execution of marketing, pricing and promotions.

AMP2 also supports the building of all print and digital advertising vehicles including flyers, reward catalogues, email promotions, TV and radio. The Media Planning interface allows the maintenance of ad vehicle attachments, multiple versions, and offers within proposed spots for ad vehicles.

The forecasting module within AMP2 provides reliable elasticity demand modeling which enables high accuracy forecasting across all product types and pricing scenarios. The Retail Express forecasting engine enables retailers to integrate supply chain planning across disparate functions, reducing waste and improving service to customers.

This impressive list of AMP2 capabilities has been strengthened by the addition of the full MicroStrategy BI Engine and technology to support the Retail Express application.

The key features of the MicroStrategy BI application are:

•Numerous report forms including executive-level reports featuring incredibly powerful insights from scorecards and dashboards;
•Operational-level reports, available via a user-friendly Web interface, providing in-report drill-down capability for greater levels of analysis ;
•The ability to add further BI reports and analysis incorporating AMP2 data.
The data marts underlying the BI tool draw and integrate data from both the client’s data sources and the AMP2 data structures. The data marts can be readily accessed by expert users through the Retail Express provided metadata specifications.

Harbor Freight Tools is a multi-channel retailer with 350 stores, covering 40 US states, operating alongside a substantial catalogue and internet business. Harbor Freight Tools will use the BI application to replace numerous MS Access and Excel reports and analyses. The Retail Express implementation of AMP2 and MicroStrategy allows Harbor Freight Tools to radically extend their current BI data insights.