The fabric of knowledge

How many miles of chino does it take to clothe the slew of J.Crew retail, catalog and Internet customers?

That’s one of the questions the popular retailer wanted to answer when it implemented a new knowledge management system to help with its strategic analysis.

The data integration software, called PowerMart, from Informatica will consolidate a wealth of data generated by J. Crew’s retail, catalog and online sales channels. By integrating historical point of sale, inventory, cost and financial data for analysis, the retailer wants to more accurately gauge its fabric needs for manufacturing, more efficiently allocate financial and human resources across the company and help top executives develop high-level business growth strategies.

“With three major sales channels at J. Crew, it was imperative to choose a data integration solution with strength to bring together large volumes of data from disparate systems across the enterprise,” said Mirek Zlotkowski, VP of business integration at J. Crew. Other systems the company evaluated only partially met its needs, he said, adding that scalability was a major factor.

PowerMart is an integrated suite of software products that help automate the process of building and managing line-of-business data marts, data warehoused and analytic applications.

With 8,400 employees, J. Crew generated $716 million in 1999 revenue.