Swoon had identified the need to develop a sophisticated approach to data and reduce their reliance on manual processing using spreadsheets. Reports and insight were generated from scratch each time, requiring significant manual effort while being tightly restricted on data volumes.

They had always prioritised customer facing projects and initiatives ahead of internal measurement and business intelligence and had tended to allocate resources accordingly. The impact of this on understanding and optimising their operations was being felt more and more across the business.

One example was product trend forecasting. This was critical to inform buying cycles but impossible with the existing infrastructure. Another such instance was with their analyst team. Due to their limited utilisation of data and insights, Swoon had struggled to attract, hire and retain analyst skillsets.

With the Kleene platform in place, Swoon was able to set up automated data pipelines to power both daily operational, and supplier facing product quality reporting.

Operational reporting at Swoon previously involved the manual copying and pasting of data from numerous sources (Orderhive, Google Sheets, Magento, Zendesk, Trustpilot, Xero) into spreadsheets. This was then manually processed for critical reporting and analysis on supply chain, On Time In Full order tracking, cancellations, returns, customer care, stock levels and more. Utilising the out of the box connectors within the Kleene app, the Kleene data pipelining functionality and working closely with the Kleene team, these slow and laborious processes were removed and replaced with automated, robust, daily scheduled runs. Reports are accurate and on time, with no human input required.

Trust in the data being used to make important decisions across operations has improved significantly. Legacy metric calculations that were buried in spreadsheets had not evolved and developed as the business adapted to the market. The exercise of building the modern data platform with Kleene exposed these areas and allowed the analyst team to put in place automated data quality checks and feedback into operational processes.

The scalability of the Kleene platform and the cloud data warehouse excited Swoon with all the potential avenues for data exploration. The foundations have been laid and the operational use case has proven the efficacy. The team has been assembled and the output being generated from data is driving value and buy in across the business.

Attracting analyst talent and empowering them with modern technology was a clear goal for Swoon. Tasking bright analysts with manual report creation was not only demotivating but also limited the output and value from deep analysis due to the time being spent on building and checking the reports. Now analysts can spend their time and skills forecasting and providing product insight from data to the design team.

Rachel noted that previously, the hugely important B2B side of Swoon (the manufacturing partners and suppliers) was simply not integrated via the data produced from operations. Now, Kleene has automated the data flows to give clear visibility on partner and product performance. In turn, this empowers accurate insight into what is selling, where stock levels are and customer satisfaction at a granular level.

With the Kleene platform and Professional Services team, Swoon were able to to rely on Kleene to provide SQL training, data warehouse architecture and data modelling best practice guidance as Swoon ramp up their usage of their modern cloud data platform