Plantorama

Putting Insights in the Hands of Every Employee

In 2011, Plantorama employees relied heavily on opinions and past experiences to make decisions, but they didn’t have data to back them up.

“We made a lot of decisions, but they were based on feelings rather than fact,” says Torben Castenskiold, Plantorama CEO (Former CFO).

Plantorama executives knew analytics was a critical missing piece in their decision-making process. As they considered their options, they realized they needed a user-friendly business intelligence (BI) solution that everyone could wrap their heads around, including gardeners, animal keepers, and horticulturalists who had no IT training or time to learn a complicated new system. And the last thing they wanted to do was disrupt daily workflow with a new process.

NORRIQ, a valued TARGIT partner, knew that TARGIT Decision Suite was the ideal solution for Plantorama due to its unique balance of advanced back-end capabilities and user-friendly front-end features. 

Faster and Better Business Decisions With TARGIT

Thanks to TARGIT, everyone at Plantorama can now access the latest insights and performance metrics, whether they work in the warehouse, on the sales floor, or at the company headquarters. 

Reports are created through the finance department and scheduled to generate automatically on a routine basis, either daily, weekly, or monthly depending on what they're designed to measure.

These automatic reports make it quick and easy to distribute data both to employees and external suppliers. Suppliers can now serve Plantorama even better thanks to greater insights and fast access to data.

Torben's team also uses TARGIT to distribute the latest insights to employees in the format and location that's most convenient for them. 

Employees working in the centers can access TARGIT on their PC or mobile device to instantly see whether goods are in stock or available in the warehouse. This helps them improve customer service and expedite sales.

Managers and department heads can dive deep into critical performance metrics, like revenue, stock figures, purchase amounts, and the number of customers per day at each center. They can also zoom out to compare performance and evaluate trends between several locations. 

"TARGIT has been a great solution for Plantorama because it is very user-friendly," says Torben. "We have a lot of employees who are not used to working with IT, such as gardeners, animal keepers or the like, who have their focus on other things. They can easily use TARGIT and really benefit from it without being particularly good at IT."

This focus on user-friendliness is a central part of TARGIT's business strategy. It enables organizations like Plantorama to improve data accessibility and decision-making across multiple departments while reducing the reliance on a small team of technical experts.

With TARGIT, everyone at Plantorama now makes faster and better business decisions.

One of the most beneficial TARGIT Decision Suite features is digital slideshows used throughout the organization to display the most important metrics for all to see. User-friendly dashboards are displayed on TV screens in every center to spread information without employees even needing to open a laptop.

These same slideshows are used to share data with Plantorama's thousands of customers, too. Screens in the centers show shoppers how much solar energy each location produces via solar panels — giving them real-time insight into the company's sustainability initiatives. 

Digging Deep into Company Data

Torben's team has been using TARGIT for several years. And while he still has a hands-on role, he explains that Plantorama's BI strategy has significantly evolved since they implemented the solution.

For one, the company has prioritized adoption and education across its user base with help from TARGIT's learning resources. "It has been very important for us to have all our super users through education at TARGIT University. This makes the quality of our solutions higher and our work much more efficient."

And while Plantorama's analysts continue to upskill inside TARGIT, Torben's role has evolved in a different direction. 

"We have used TARGIT for a long time. I used to be a big part of the solution and did dashboards myself. Today, we have a dedicated TARGIT expert creating the reports and dashboards." 

These days, Torben still uses TARGIT several times per day. In the morning, he checks in on the budgets for the day. Near the end of his workday, Torben evaluates the figures coming in from daily business operations at each of the centers, checking to see if Plantorama is on track toward its daily revenue goals. 

However, he has passed the torch when it comes to more complex analyses and customization inside TARGIT. Jannik Breum, Plantorama's Omnichannel Business Analyst, handles multiple analyses in TARGIT while also leading the charge for company-wide performance management. 

"For us, BI and analytics are key to how our department works. They create a foundation of transparency from which we can scope new projects and evaluate how well we are doing our jobs," says Jannik. 

He explains that TARGIT's intuitive features and self-led eLearning courses helped him get up and running quickly. "My overall experience with TARGIT has been great. I did an eLearning course and within three weeks, I was completely comfortable building dashboards, reports, and so on. It's very user-friendly and user-oriented."  

Jannik primarily uses TARGIT to monitor critical key performance indicators (KPIs) within various dashboards. Then, he uses the results to prioritize tasks, improvements, and new initiatives. He explains that the solution is essential in project management and prioritization.

"Now, we can use data to see what has worked well in the past and which projects will have the biggest business impact. After each project, we can use TARGIT to measure the impact of our work." 

Jannik's team also leverages TARGIT's pre-defined dimensions to quickly create new analyses without the need for extensive development work. 

"TARGIT is highly flexible for comparisons across pre-defined dimensions. We only operate in the front end of TARGIT. So for us, it's very helpful that we can quickly generate comparisons and create the analyses that we need instead of relying on a slow, complicated back-end process."

This flexibility, combined with insights and support from NORRIQ, makes TARGIT an invaluable tool for Jannik's dual role in improving data analysis and overall performance at Plantorama. 

Planning for Future Seasons of Growth

As Torben and the entire Plantorama team look to the future, they are confident that BI, and TARGIT specifically, will be an integral part of their growth plans. 

"We are very happy with our cooperation with TARGIT," says Torben. "When we have new things that we want to do with our solution, they listen to us. So we feel that TARGIT is there for their customers." 

Plantorama’s Business Controller Lisbeth Odgaard Strand recently developed a BI design manual for the company’s dashboards and KPI objects, which has allowed Plantorama to enhance the look and feel of its TARGIT interface while improving data visibility and giving employees new ways to visualize important information.  

As of today, the new designs have been rolled out on many of the dashboards used by employees and managers in Plantorama’s garden centers. Lisbeth plans to continue implementing the design manual in other business areas as well, such as marketing and finance.  

She also hopes to develop more custom designs and visualizations to support various end-users throughout the company. “We would like to create more customized KPIs with pictures in dashboards rather than traditional numbers-based reports to increase user adoption and make people more excited about the insights we are sharing in TARGIT.”  

Some other initiatives include new TARGIT integrations that relate to Plantorama's garden centers and company-wide ESG projects.  

"We want to open more garden centers in the coming years, and we want to make the right decisions as our operations expand," Torben shares. "We want to be more data-driven in the future than we are today, which means connecting more data sources to TARGIT related to our ESG efforts, forecasting, and other key business initiatives."