Market Perspectives

The annual Ventana Research Digital Leadership Awards recognize organizations and individuals that utilize technology to advance business and IT. The Digital Leadership Awards showcase the professional leadership and their use of business applications or technology that contribute significantly to improved efficiency, productivity and the performance of their organization. This prestigious award recognizes leaders and pioneers who have contributed to their organization’s success and championed improvements across their people, processes, information and technology.

Ventana Research has awarded Chad Simpson at City Furniture using Denodo its prestigious 2021 Digital Leadership Award in Digital Technology. This award recognizes the individual, organization and technology that best exemplifies leadership in the technologies that support any or all of the following areas: analytics and data, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AL/ML), blockchain, cloud computing, collaborative and conversational computing, extended reality, internet of things, mobile computing and robotic automation. All finalists in digital technology were considered for this prestigious award.

Organizations can achieve significant innovation through the deployment and use of digital technology. Digital technologies can improve both efficiency and effectiveness for the business and its IT operations. Embracing emerging technology is a necessity in today’s competitive market environment to enable the workforce and customers to engage effectively and to elevate the potential return on the organization’s assets.

Ventana Research selected City Furniture for the 14^th Annual Digital Leadership Award for Digital Technology as it demonstrates the digital potential of data by using virtualization and processing that directly impact operational performance and business outcomes.

City Furniture is a Florida-based retailer that is on a mission to change the way people live — with beautiful home furnishings at incredible value. That mission needed a digital transformation created by a data-driven future. While the company has been experiencing rapid growth, it encountered challenges with slow and inefficient traditional data management technologies to transform their business model. Traditional ETL-based data integration methods had high resource costs, were slow to implement and were impeding important data initiatives for the company. City Furniture’s goal was to create a data virtualization layer to centralize data across the enterprise with a small amount of engineering effort. To achieve this, they needed to provide accurate data to different teams such as sales, marketing, supply chain and business operations, and help them make faster decisions.

With Denodo Platform’s data virtualization capabilities, City Furniture was able to eliminate the heavy software engineering efforts around processes to build all of these pipelines. Business users used to consume information monthly, but now they can do so daily. With data-bound Excel spreadsheets, business users get on-demand data views. It’s now much easier and faster to connect to and combine data sets so business users get insights more quickly. The technology change brought about a paradigm shift in the culture on how data is treated.

The technology change enabled business users to upload their own Excel sheets to the Denodo Platform’s virtualized layer and join those with enterprise data already available. This new ability to enrich their own data with enterprise-level data created by IT drastically changes the way data is consumed, builds trust in an organic way and enhances collaboration between IT and business. With centralized data, City Furniture was able to identify which products have a high frequency of returns and which vendor’s products have a high propensity of returns and damage complaints. This improved the efficiency of the ordering process.

Leadership stakeholders benefited from the Denodo Platform in that it provides them with the real-time performance data they need when they need it so they are able to identify the issues and coach associates more effectively. The advanced analytics that leverage real-time access to centralized data has enabled City Furniture’s leadership to optimize deliveries, which leads to increased levels of customer satisfaction as well as increases in revenue. Leadership is more equipped to make faster decisions, and because of those faster decisions, all the downstream revenue-generating functions are able to be nimble.

The areas that have seen the most benefit are operations, sales, supply chain and the web team. City Furniture found that during COVID-19, faster access to data helped in timing the market and guiding them in picking up market share and maximizing profits. It changed the way City Furniture did business very quickly, and again, faster access to centralized data through the Denodo Platform helped to ensure rapid responses. This foundational shift in business priority and how it looked at data was made possible because of the Denodo Platform in the middle of City Furniture’s architecture. The project has enabled delivery of more reports that are full of actionable production insight and are definitely driving better decisions. City Furniture has picked up market share, and much of that can be attributed to this project.

Digital Technology is a software category in need of innovation and optimization. Denodo addresses the challenges of simplifying the use of data across any source. Organizations with issues in utilizing data across platforms and need to find the value from it for analytics and operations will appreciate what they offer.

Organizations looking to maximize the value of its business and technology investments across its people and processes should consider how Digital Technology can optimize its digital potential. If you have not examined how Denodo can help your organization, it is well worth your time. Congratulations, Chad Simpson at City Furniture, for your leadership.

Ventana Research offers expertise and research-based guidance on embracing digital technology to increase the effectiveness of the workforce and engagement of customers. Change is required to maintain competitiveness and to enable business resilience and workforce readiness to achieve the outcomes your organization deserves.