Analytics-powered partnership

Baby Bunting is Australia’s largest specialty nursery and maternity retailer. It aims to provide customers with the largest range of products across all departments. Its wide selection of brands is available online and in store, offering parents a chance to fit their purchases around their lives. Baby Bunting’s core purpose is to support new and expectant parents in the early years of parenthood.

Baby Bunting is Australia’s largest nursery and maternity retailer whose clear understanding of customer needs has defined its four decades of growth and the recent expansion to New Zealand.

However, disparate data from multiple business sources and applications meant time-consuming and sub-optimal processes. Adjusting or growing the reporting solution was not an easy or efficient task. The company needed to improve its data analytics and reporting and move its ERP data into a Microsoft modern data platform.

Aiming for the best results, Baby Bunting partnered with Fujitsu Data & AI to centralise existing reporting and analytics capabilities, integrate information from other systems and turn multi-country ERP data into a single source of truth. It was the beginning of a multi-year partnership across many transformation projects for retail operations in Australia and New Zealand.

Fujitsu Data & AI initially helped the Baby Bunting data transformation journey through implementation of its ResultsNow Power BI Foundations Accelerator to simplify reporting and improve analytical capacity. This accelerator solution provided a well governed, user-centric and intuitive reporting framework to enable clear insights into business performance and key indicators, allowing for faster data-driven decisions, ROI maximisation and even improved stock management.

“The data quality has matured a lot as well,” says Brodie Nicholson, Data & Analytics Manager at Baby Bunting. “And it’s nice to be confident that if there’s an issue, it’s going to get fixed quickly.”

The speed of report development for Baby Bunting has also improved significantly, involving increasingly complex data, with the information now visible to all key employees.

When asked about employees’ and leaders’ ability to make decisions in the past, Mr Nicholson says: “We had disparate data from multiple business applications which required more time and manual work in the reporting processes. Now, we have integrated, user-friendly Power BI datasets that our people are using for their own self-service analysis.”

This solution is further supported by Fujitsu’s Data and Analytics Platform (DAPS) Managed Service which operates, maintains and enhances the core platform, allowing Baby Bunting to focus solely on data. “I think there’s always a degree of firefighting in this game,” says Mr Nicholson. “It’s a big help to not have to deal with that. We’ve seen improvements in reliability to the point where I get a lot more sleep than I used to.”

Determined to have reliable data across its operations, the company also tasked Fujitsu Data & AI with integrating a second instance of Baby Bunting’s ERP application into the Azure Data Platform for the company’s trade and finance Power BI reporting requirements in New Zealand.

The company achieved a consolidated Australia and New Zealand reporting solution by transforming multi-country ERP data into a single source of truth. Employees can now review unified sales, promotion and inventory data in both local and foreign currencies.

With everything almost entirely cloud first, Baby Bunting boasts a modern data platform and reporting solution that is very flexible. “We’re able to spin up and spin down based on our needs very easily,” comments Mr Nicholson. “And it’s very reliable.”

Fujitsu Data & AI has helped the company deliver a modern data platform and reporting solution that is fit for purpose. “It’s deliberately simple because we’re trying to minimise the amount of complexity we have to maintain. That’s what I like about the architecture we have. It’s cost effective. It’s not over the top. Technically, it’s where it needs to be for where Baby Bunting is in the market,” says Mr Nicholson.

With access to years of historical sales data and near real-time updates, the company’s performance can now be easily seen, and more specific plans can be aligned to a clearer roadmap.

Financial savings and gains are also visible. “We’ve seen tangible savings on our expense for the data platform transformation programme, which amount to approximately 50% of the platform operating cost,” says Mr Nicholson. “Ultimately, if we hadn’t gone on this journey and we hadn’t expanded what we’ve done, we wouldn’t have been able to achieve the savings.”

The biggest point of pride for Mr Nicholson is how well Fujitsu Data & AI and Baby Bunting have worked together during the multi-year partnership. The collaboration has been an example of both teams knowing exactly what needed to be achieved and trying to get there together.

“We’ve always managed third parties, but it was new to be working this intimately with another team,” says Mr Nicholson. “Fujitsu Data & AI has been a trusted and integral part of the process all the way. And they have good people that care about our business, proactively looking for ways to improve the platform and making suggestions on how we might do things better in the future.”

Baby Bunting’s dedication to continuous improvement means that Fujitsu Data & AI will continue to partner and support Baby Bunting’s long-term growth.