Dicks Sporting Goods

Dicks Sporting Goods is a major playing in the Sporting apparel and equipment industry. They have been in business since 1948 when they were just a fishing supply company. Now they have over 300 stores in 34 states and annual revenues just under $4 Billion.

Just like many big retail changes Dick’s began suffering from information technology challenges. Specific challenges included there systems which managed inventory and also stocking of stores. They had an outdated Merchandise management software which was preventing them from succeeding.

Just a few of the issues experienced in the outdated system included, inability to performance specific to a store when it came to equipment such as a tennis racket. The database took up to 1 hour sometimes when trying to pull data from it. They had no central repository and the company was struggling without having any standard company wide sales and inventory reports available.

Many employees kept their own records of their departments. This was not readily available to other departments since the employees were keeping it on their machines vs. uploading it to a central repository. This made for lost reports, data which could have helped Dicks improve their customer experience.

Dick’s Sporting Goods decided in 2003 it was time to conduct a full overhaul of their data storage system. They choose a company called MicroStrategy with an Oracle 8i database backend. The new system was customizable and offered ability to track sales of apparel and equipment in each store and by region.

Choosing MicroStrategy fit the requirements that Dick’s Sporting Goods had. It offered them customizable reports, canned reports, faster response time when pulling data from it’s Database and expanded on the ability to report on inventory from each store and region including equipment not just apparel.

Dicks can now create multiple reports to help management review their revenue and also see where they need to tweak sales/inventory or product...