Swoon is a design-led furniture company that specialises in providing carefully crafted and curated home furnishings. Inspired by everything from large-scale architecture to the more intricate details of design, Swoon is committed to delivering high-quality and beautiful pieces to customers by working with some of the best artisans from the UK, Europe and the rest of the world.

Unifying Disparate Data Sources

As the company’s reputation has expanded, demand has increased. Maintaining accurate records of materials, sources, customers, vendors, deliveries and other metrics is more important than ever. As the volume of Swoon’s data grew, the repeated task of running the reporting cycle also increased.

Furthermore, Swoon was working within a reporting framework that utilised numerous disparate solutions, including MySQL extracts, Excel workbooks and Google documents. To minimise these manual efforts and streamline the process, the company decided it was time for a more effective and sustainable solution. InterWorks was soon brought on to guide Swoon toward the right technologies.

InterWorks Sales Executive Eugene Anang came onto the project and worked closely with the Head of BI at Swoon, Mike Cowan, to map out the company’s vision and get a sense of its needs. Meeting with various stakeholders to ensure that each department’s modular requirements were met, the BI architecture was scoped and the reporting framework outlined over a period of six weeks. Once the full spectrum of Swoon’s BI needs were understood, some example dashboards in Tableau were offered up as an alternative reporting system. Soon, there was no doubt that Tableau was the right fit for Swoon’s data visualisation needs.

Bolstering Data Trust with Automation

Analytics Consultant Mavis Liu entered the project and began implementing Tableau. Once in place, the company had a single source of truth for the first time. Previously struggling to reconcile multiple data sources for complex retail KPIs, Swoon now had a centralised base for its data truth. This not only facilitated more visibility and reinforced data trust throughout the organisation, but it also gave employees back hours of time. Several individuals used to spend full workdays combing through the previous week’s trading and operational performance, striving to distill it into a reportable format for the company’s general consumption.

In addition to reporting and visualisation support, part of Swoon’s long-term plan needed to include an accessible ETL tool to build a data-warehousing solution that would simplify its intake of data from 15 different sources. Soon, Alteryx was introduced, and automated workflows were created to alleviate the manual burden of data analysis. These flows were able to pull data from outside sources into the Swoon database, schedule regular refreshes, and better prepare data for further reporting. This automation also ensured data accuracy, a reassuring improvement over the risk of manual input and juggling multiple data sources.

Empowered to Make Data-Driven Decisions

With the implementation of Tableau and Alteryx, Swoon is now positioned for growth and primed to meet their increasing demand with ease, efficiency and flexibility. InterWorks led Tableau training to empower the company’s employees with the expertise and tools to be autonomous in their analytics journey. Now, Swoon continues to embed dashboards, consistently iterating and improving them, and even has superusers equipped to build Tableau reports independently.

Technologies like Tableau and Alteryx are ideal complements for businesses of any size, and in the case of Swoon, a solid foundation has been established upon which they can build in the future. Now able to accurately track metrics like inventory, delivery information, storage forecasts and more, Swoon is ready to move into a space of even more progress and growth with the security of a single source of data truth, centralised analytics and organisation-wide visibility. We’re excited that we had the opportunity to support Swoon in designing the future of their dreams.

“We are a very data-driven business, and we look for a data point to inform each strategic decision directly. As a result, having data we can both easily visualise and trust has been very helpful. It unlocks learning potential; I think we have only scratched the surface of what BI could help us to achieve and discover … I think InterWorks have been great in connecting us with the right people to help us maximise its potential.”
– Annie Aveyard, Head of Finance for Swoon