Recognized as the premier luxury retailer in America for over a century, Neiman Marcus offers upscale assortments of apparel, accessories, jewelry, beauty and decorative home products to the affluent consumer. Renown for its iconic print catalog, Neiman Marcus has taken its direct-to-consumer business even further with the help of MightyData. We were fortunate to partner with this powerhouse retailer several years ago to help them update their database to efficiently manage all of their merchandise photography and copy blocks for their catalog and Web site.
Since then, Neiman Marcus has been challenged to process more Web data as well as print and online production details at a much faster rate than ever before. The internal production teams for Neiman Marcus turned once again to MightyData to help them develop a solution that would optimize the speed of the transfer of product information messages from IBM WebSphere, its master information data management system, to FileMaker for both their print catalog and online operations.
Technology
Scott Schley, Business Solutions Management, collaborated with Ross “Mac” Mackintosh, Champion of Transformation, to create a robust exchange of information between the external system and FileMaker, optimized to parse and utilize XML data company-wide across multiple internal production teams. The newly developed application became known to many as, LeapFrog.
Now, anytime updates are needed to the website or when there’s a roll out of a new catalog, LeapFrog processes Web data and asset requests faster, while efficiently managing the flow of information between internal Web and production team members. In addition, MightyData improved system notifications, alerting team members to the current system status to allow for more timely knowledge of any system disruptions.
Transformation
The transformation caused by LeapFrog was quite dramatic. Catalog rollouts that used to take 2 weeks can now be done in 2 days. Case in point: the previous system handled 140,000 messages in 2 weeks. These messages contain information on products such as copy, pictures, sizing, colors, etc. With LeapFrog, processing nearly doubled to 260,000 messages, but was handled in only 2 days.
Production rates changed so dramatically it had Scott uttering,
Wow!
What’s more, LeapFrog synched with every computer in the network enabling production to run during the day as well as beyond after hours. When Joe Condomina, Vice President of Neiman Marcus Direct and Online Systems, says,
You are a truly valued partner.
That’s a giant leapfrog forward as far as we’re concerned.