Virgin Vie At Home Chooses Logi 8 Dashboards and Reports to Keep 12,000 Cosmetics Sales Consultants Better Informed and Better Performers

About Virgin Vie at Home

A philosophy that runs through every Virgin company is the desire to be different by being better. Virgin Vie At Home is no exception. Established 10 years ago, this UK-based Cosmetics and Jewellery brand generated sales of £80 million (about $160 million US) in 2006.

Better quality, better service and better value are hallmarks of Virgin Vie At Home, and their products are cutting edge and stylish but affordable and accessible at the same time. Virgin Vie At Home gives customers a choice to shop in a retail environment from one of its 16 UK-based stores, via the Internet, or in the comfort of their own home to reap all additional benefits that come with holding a Virgin Vie At Home party.

The Direct Selling channel is an incredibly successful sales channel for Virgin Vie At Home with in-home parties simplifying the whole purchasing experience and total direct sales equating to more than 86% of Virgin Vie At Home’s total business. With more than 12,000 consultants nationwide, holding over 5,000 parties a week, over 40,000 customers have access to the brand and to a very personalized shopping experience.

The Challenge

Virgin Vie at Home Systems Analyst, Andrew Steward, and his team were faced with the challenge of developing a Web-based reporting system that would provide timely information to this army of sales consultants. The reporting system needed to make the consultants better informed and, at the end of the day, better performers for the company. The technique of being different by being better was high on his agenda as he sorted through the options for building their new reporting system. LogiXML was able to provide the solution.

"We had a very clear set of objectives in mind. Our production Unix-based system does an outstanding job on our core business functions, but it is not very hospitable as a user query environment," notes Steward. "We set up a SQL Server-based data mart to handle that function, and the next challenge was developing the access environment that would work for our consultants and retail teams."

The Solution

"From the user’s perspective we needed an easy-to-use and easy-to-access system. We expect our sales consultant to be great at sales but do not expect them to be software developers. Therefore, the first issue was finding a Web-based client that could be accessed from anywhere. We did not want to require any software on the client, and we needed to support all the popular Web browsers. This technical requirement narrowed the field considerably in favor of LogiXML’s Logi 8. The fact that LogiXML offers a licensing model that places no limits on the number of users supported was also a key element in the evaluation. Supporting a base of 12,000 plus users meant that a "cost per seat" model would simply not work for us."

"Another key objective was cutting down the number of individual queries that were required to meet the needs of the sales consultants. A Dashboard implementation that pushes the most commonly requested data out to users pre-empts about 80% of the queries. We are particularly impressed with the new Logi 8 Dashboard feature. The new graphical presentation offers a clean designer look appropriate for a fashion industry leader, and the Dashboard elements are easily understood by our non-technical users."

"Of course, as developers, my team had some selfish reasons to choose Logi 8. In order to keep up with report demand, the ability to build and deploy reports quickly was a critical factor in our choice. The LogiXML elemental approach to building reports, which allows you to assemble reports from existing components, makes the process very easy. Plus, the ability to define role-based and table-based security reduces the number of total reports that need to be developed to reach our objectives."

The Results

"Before making our choice of LogiXML, we undertook a detailed competitive evaluation of reporting products that included Microsoft/ProClarity, Cognos and others. In many ways, LogiXML is a better alterative because it is different. LogiXML’s combination of pure Web-based implementation, a great licensing model, an outstanding user interface and a highly productive report development toolset made it that winner. Based on our experience at Virgin Vie at Home, LogiXML is an outstanding Business Intelligence choice," concluded Steward.