Client Description

J. Crew Group, Inc. provides apparel products. The retailer is known for its preppy fashions, including jeans, khakis, and other items sold to young professionals through its catalogs, websites, and nearly 520 retail and factory stores across the US under the J. Crew, and Madewell banners. J Crew Retail’s stores are upscale and located in high-end regional malls, lifestyle centers, and on-street locations.

Challenge

J Crew was in the middle of implementing a new reporting system that involved ingesting POS data into IBM’s MDM solution. This solution involved creating upwards of 500K individual XML files using DataStage’s latest XML pack (hierarchical stage).

Solution

Initially, our team was just responsible for creating the XML files, but soon inherited the staging of all the POS data in an Oracle database via DataStage jobs and shell scripts.

Benefits

The resulting reporting solution allows J Crew to build full profiles of their customers including purchasing habits and both geographic and time-based fashion trends.