Bricoio, with its 120 stores, 4 million annual receipts, and a turnover of €300 million, is Italy’s leading do-it-yourself retailer in the large-format retail sector.
The company’s mission is to guide customers in purchasing products and services that make everyday life beautiful and fulfilling in the home and garden.
In the DIY industry, data is critical to staying competitive, and Bricoio knows this well. Indeed, in an ever-changing market, data analysis enables companies to anticipate trends, adapt quickly to new needs, and make more informed strategic decisions.
To fully understand customer behavior, optimize product assortment, improve supply chain efficiency, and increasingly personalize promotional campaigns, Bricoio recognized the need to invest in an effective and scalable data-driven strategy.
Beginning with the construction of a data platform to unify their data in a single cloud-based hub, and supplemented by an easy-to-use data visualization tool to replace their previous BI solution, Bricoio aimed to empower store managers and corporate management to monitor the performance of various areas and branches intuitively and quickly.
The goal for Bricoio was therefore clear: to replace the previous BI system to break data silos and make informed decisions. What was not yet clear, however, was how to represent the information that the company was used to seeing in a tabular format, and how to structure the implementation path.
Hence the choice of Huware, which, together with Google Cloud technology, was identified by Bricoio as the ideal partner to accompany the company on a customized path that could speed up not only the implementation of the chosen technologies, but also adoption.
In an initial analysis and design phase, Huware initiated a series of interviews with Bricoio’s business teams to understand their real needs and identify relevant data sources. This phase saw strong involvement from business stakeholders: starting with management control for KPI identification, then collaborating with the head of sales and the two area heads for dashboard design and the creation of data visualizations.
In the second phase of technical development, BigQuery was utilized to integrate various data sources and build the data platform. Subsequently, Looker was leveraged to construct the semantic layer, encompassing the data governance framework for data security and KPI calculation logic, as well as the design and implementation of dashboards.
The third phase, data validation, involved collaboration with the sales team to perform data cleaning and verification, ensuring the data displayed in Looker precisely matched the source systems.
Finally, the fourth phase involved user training, focusing on dashboard end-users. Through dedicated sessions with area heads and management control, complemented by video training for the wider audience, the project prioritized tool adoption to ensure a real return on investment.
"Now with Looker we visualize dashboards that make it easy to consult and monitor key business indicators, such as sales trends, average receipt, and margin. In addition to visualization, the dashboards allow us to quickly compare values to get a clear trend of each store compared to competitors, other Bricoio stores, and the previous year."
Agostino Russo
Responsabile IT
Through the implementation of Looker, Bricoio was able to achieve several important results.
First, the company significantly improved the quality of its data, which previously had inaccuracies and gaps. This allowed Bricoio to have a clearer and more reliable view of its business and to have a solid database for future AI and Gen AI projects for sales forecasting, optimized stock management, and product catalog improvement.
In addition, the high flexibility and customization of Google’s technology enabled Bricoio to overcome the limitations of its previous rigid and slow BI system, allowing it to perform more in-depth analysis and obtain information more quickly, thus supporting optimized decision-making at all levels of the organization.
"Thanks to Huware’s expertise, we were guided at every stage of the BI project: from the initial needs analysis to implementation and training, the Huware team enabled us to avoid common mistakes, optimize time, and achieve a final result in line with our expectations. While thanks to Looker’s flexibility, we were able to create tailored dashboards, define custom KPIs, and integrate data from different sources."
Agostino Russo
Responsabile IT