Macy's reduces costs and gains new insights into business operations.

With Hippobyte, Macy’s lowers its operating costs by eliminating complex homegrown ETL jobs and delivers more thorough visibility into resource utilization, agile project delivery, and financial health and governance.

Key Takeaways

• Macy’s analyzes more data with Hippobyte automated connectors.
• Macy’s Data Analytics Team was able to eliminate pre-Hippobyte data quality issues and raise stakeholder engagement with continually up-to-date metrics.
• Hippobyte allowed Macy’s Data Analytics team to deliver more value with reduced headcount.
• Macy’s to set up Hippobyte and got data flowing into MySQLwithin hours and deployed its first Hippobyte-powered dashboard the same day.
• Macy’s delivered over 50 actionable dashboards and interactive reports in Tableau and React-based custom dashboard.

Data Stack

• Pipeline: Hippobyte
• Connectors: Portfolio for JIRA, JIRA Software, Clarity PPM, Clarity PPM Data Warehouse, ServiceNow, VersionOne
• Destination: MySQL
• BI Tools: Tableau, React-based custom dashboard

Macy’s, Inc. is one of the nation’s premier retailers. The company operates more than 700 department stores under the nameplates Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s, and approximately 125 specialty stores that include Bloomingdale’s The Outlet, Bluemercury and Macy’s Backstage. Macy’s, Inc. operates stores in 45 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, and Puerto Rico, as well as macys.com, bloomingdales.com, and bluemercury.com. Bloomingdale’s stores in Dubai and Kuwait are operated by Al Tayer Group LLC under license agreements. Macy’s, Inc. has corporate offices in New York, New York.

Centralized Data Model

As an evolving business with distributed organizations and business applications full of valuable data, Macy’s found that centralizing its business application data was needed to meet the growing needs of internal stakeholders.

“Hippobyte has been a game-changer,” says Macy’s Senior Manager of Business Data Analytics. “It allowed us to focus on delivering value to our internal stakeholders instead of building out ETL jobs and trouble-shooting our data stack. Additionally, we now have access to all our most pertinent data in a centralized database where we can use Tableau and our custom Health Dashboard for all business analytic needs. The application data connectors have made our functions much more focused on business outcomes instead of engineering challenges. We can deliver multi-source dashboards in record time with less headcount and complete confidence that our data is timely and trustworthy.”

Reduced Expense Costs and Refocused Team

Before Hippobyte, Macy’s built countless point-to-point data integrations between various applications and reporting platforms. Over time, decentralized reporting caused data discrepancies in reporting due to timing, inconsistent data transformations, and misunderstood metric methodologies. Hippobyte allowed Macy’s to centralize its data and define a single source of truth for its most critical financial metrics.

Buying a business-ready solution was a better choice for Macy’s. “At first, developing light ETL wrappers seemed like a low-cost and efficient way of replicating application data into our on-premise database. That turned out to be false. Our team spent much more time tracking down quirky data quality issues than ever before, and our stakeholder’s trust in our analytics was eroding fast. We needed a bulletproof solution, and we found one with Hippobyte.”

Increase in Usable Data Sources.

From a data analytics aspect, Macy’s Clarity PPM instance, which helps the business with resource allocations, contractor time entry, and project financials, was especially tricky. Macy’s needed to join Clarity PPM data elements with Jira and ServiceNow data to deliver more comprehensive and actionable dashboards.

Hippobyte’s Clarity PPM data connector allows Macy’s to deliver up-to-the-minute data into a MySQL operational database for subsequent presentation on a React-based dashboard developed internally within Macy’s and in live connection Tableau reports. Macy’s dashboard users have access to Clarity PPM and associated metrics in near real-time.

50+ Dashboards in Tableau.

Macy’s has invested in Tableau over five years ago. Tableau allows Macy’s to make sense of multiple data sets without negatively impacting the performance of underlying sources. “The beauty of Tableau is its large community, deploying novel visualizations and interactive dashboards is easy when you have a large community to support you.” Macy’s now has over 50+ Tableau dashboards of various complexity powered data delivered by Hippobyte’s automated ETL platform.

From In-App Analytics to Data Your Way

“Our leaders demand timely, actionable metrics. Actionable metrics are seldom based on a single data set. More often, actionable insights are derived from multiple data sets across several business applications. In-app dashboards and reports are fine for users of a given application; however, our decision-makers don’t have the time to learn to navigate Clarity and Jira and ServiceNow and, and… They demand, and rightfully so, a simple and easy way to consume information regardless of where the data is stored. Decisions should be made on data instead of feeling. To do so, data must be readily available.”

“We love what Hippobyte enables us to do. Choosing Hippobyte has been a paradigm shift for how we deliver more analytics to a larger part of the organization. We are fans.”

Are you ready to be your organization’s hero? Sign up for a personalized demo of Hippobyte today.

About Hippobyte

The Hippobyte data platform is the fastest and most reliable way to replicate and synchronize your application and file data into an on-premise or cloud-based data warehouse or operational database. Hippobyte automated connectors take minutes to configure and require no ongoing maintenance to scale and improve your business analytics and focus on business results.