Création Gross

The Customer

The family-run, medium-sized company Création Gross GmbH & Co. KG, from the Franconian town of Hersbruck, has been successfully designing and producing high-quality men’s fashion for almost a hundred years. The company’s claim is to combine the tradition of craftsmanship and the highest quality with the spirit of the times and an internationally inspired design. Top labels such as “Carl Gross” and “CG – CLUB of GENTS” are not only set in local and regional markets, but are now available in 37 countries worldwide. The company employs 200 people at its headquarters in Hersbruck and 40 in factory outlet centres.

The Challenge

The company had recently migrated to Microsoft Dynamics 365 as its ERP, but had not made any progress with reporting, which is a central building block of decision-making. The main reason was that the existing system was very rigid and corresponding know-how and support were no longer available. The goal for 2022 was to accelerate the digital transformation in areas such as marketing, sales, warehousing and logistics as well as sustainability with the integration of a cloud-based data platform that is as fully accessible as possible.

The fast response and flexibility as well as the hands-on mentality of Hitachi Solutions convinced Création Gross immediately. Within one day, the Data & Analytics experts from Hitachi Solutions drew up a roadmap together with the decision-makers in the company and quickly started implementing the desired solution. The task was to establish a state-of-the-art data platform within four months by the end of 2022. Power BI, the business intelligence solution from Microsoft, and a future-proof architecture in the Microsoft Azure Cloud were to create the basis for this.

The Solution

First, the experts from Hitachi Solutions conducted a focus day with decision-makers from different areas of the country as part of an initial analysis phase. The challenges currently facing the company, the strategic goals to be achieved, the data needed to achieve them and the details of the roadmap to get there were identified and documented. The path to the Azure Cloud could be accelerated with the Modern Data Platform Accelerator – a solution from Hitachi Solutions with a pre-configured standard for various Microsoft solutions to be used, such as Microsoft Synapse, Azure Data Lake, Azure Key Vault and many more.

The functionalities already available in the standard configuration of Microsoft Dynamics 365 allow a comfortable activation of the data flows in interaction with the Modern Data Platform. In this way, the data could be made available to the users quickly and easily. Employees in controlling were able to create their own reports very quickly without intensive training. Additional features and adjustments were realised in further sprints, either together with the experts from Hitachi Solutions or on their own initiative by the Création Gross team. The project was reliably implemented on time and within budget.

The Future

With its new cloud-based architecture, Création Gross is now prepared to take maximum advantage of its business data using the latest AI and ML technologies. With this solution, the company can analyse customer, sales and warehouse data in near real time and use these insights to make strategic decisions based on secure data. This also allows it to optimise the use of resources in the long term.

Dashboards can be used to visualise and provide detailed information on product sales, regional sales or warehouse capacities with just a few clicks. Customer transactional, behavioural, demographic and business data are consolidated into a single source of truth and can be accessed across divisions at any time to generate complete customer profiles for a 360-degree perspective.

Consolidated data, more precise insights and flexibly retrievable reports now also significantly simplify cross-divisional collaboration. Efficiency is a key added value of this solution. In the past, Création Gross had to invest extensively in solution optimisations and in the maintenance of a legacy system that had become increasingly complex over the years. Many application developments can now be solved in-house or, if necessary, with partners. Technological dependencies or downtime are now a thing of the past.

Hitachi Solutions accompanies companies on their data journey flexibly, on an equal footing and with solutions from a single source – regardless of where they currently stand. In this way, the data & analytics experts from Hitachi Solutions will support Création Gross in the future in taking advantage of all the opportunities that open up with the new data platform, modern analytics and machine learning. This includes, for example, the use of ML for space optimisation. With appropriate user training, Création Gross can conquer new data territory step by step. With the prospect of being able to solve a large part of the requirements itself from now on, the company has become much more independent. The ideal conditions for this have now been created.