Breuninger

Knowing the company
What started as a small business with a staff of just three, founded in 1881 by Eduard Breuninger, it has grown into the well-known fashion and lifestyle company Breuninger. Breuninger's more than 4,000 employees working in the company's ten stores are dedicated to service excellence, providing customers with a unique shopping experience and offering trendsetting products.

At Breuninger all tasks are undertaken with a high level of quality and professionalism. The spacious, 35,000 square metre flagship store in Stuttgart as well as nine further shops in Karlsruhe, Nuremberg, Leipzig, Frankfurt (MTZ) and other locations present the Breuninger world of fashion, perfume, shoes, accessories, sports wares and home living in a stylish and exclusive setting.

Defining the strategy
Breuninger has been using functions for monitoring payment process transactions (loss prevention) since 2003, when it introduced a POS and branch management solution from Torex. Taking the lead in modernising its IT landscape, Breuninger was the first German retailer to make the strategic decision to introduce Torex Business Analytics and Torex Loss Prevention - an integrated suite of solutions for business data analysis and loss prevention. The company expects the broad functional range of the solution to further improve the transparency and auditability of its business processes.

Choosing the solution
The decision to choose Torex Business Analytics and Torex Loss Prevention was made in the Autumn of 2009. The solution went live in July 2010, and is currently mainly being used by the internal auditing and inventory departments. When Torex integrated the product into Breuninger's system environment, it also made several customisations to account for specific needs of the company.

The Torex solution enables Breuninger to analyse all POS data - from the item master through to sales transactions - and thus improve transparency throughout the entire company. This gives the established company comprehensive protection against deviations in payment processing workflows, including organisational irregularities and inefficiencies or even fraudulent transactions. Identifying such activities will help Breuninger to reduce losses in time and money and, just as important, also prevent loss of customer trust, inventory errors and credit card fraud.

The Torex software provides various graphical and table views to display the evaluated data. Scorecard based analyses allow for applying different weightings and visualising them graphically according to priority.

The new application helps to maximise profits and also enables Breuninger to comply with applicable legal security regulations. With the new software the retailer can meet GDPdU (German principles on data access and auditability of digital documents) and other compliance provisions, so the solution represents a major milestone in extending internal control structures.

Achieving return on investment
Breuninger expects the new software to significantly boost internal transparency. This is of particular importance when it comes to compliance. The general goal is to put a framework into place that allows all relevant processes to be handled in a transparent and traceable manner.

One of the core demands of Breuninger is to be able to attain audit-compliant business processes. The Torex product suite provides the company with a tool to tap into this information and achieve the level of transparency prescribed by law, thus guaranteeing compliant workflows. Breuninger is planning to explore step by step the product's functional range, extending the solution where needed. Additional users can be added at any time, including the POS or accounting department, all of which stand to benefit from using the analysis data delivered by the new Torex product for their own purposes.