Saint Charles increases effectiveness in market responses with Zoho Analytics

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    10+Users
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    1 FTECost saved
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    3Data Sources

"A major benefit of using Zoho Analytics is the reduction in time spent on crunching numbers. Another important thing for me is to not only have a reporting system but an automated one to such a degree that it doesn’t need any manual intervention. Zoho Analytics really does it well."

Nick Poeschl
Co-Founder, Saint Charles

About Saint Charles

Saint Charles, is a European premium pharmacy brand with a focus on traditional European naturopathy. The pharmacy was founded in 1886 by pharmacist Alfred Blumenthal and has been located in Vienna since the beginning of the 20th century. Since November 19, 2006 it has been called "Saint Charles," with the Saint Charles Cosmothecary and Saint Charles Alimentary being born on the same day.

Challenges: Simple BI

Nick Poeschl is the co-founder of Saint Charles, and handles business development and analytics. The company brings in data from multiple sources, like Magneto, their webshop, EasyBill, their internal POS system, and Google Analytics. And since they generate lots of data from so many systems, analyzing it became a challenge.

Poeschl was using Microsoft Excel and found it tough to blend and analyze data manually. He wanted to create reports and dashboards by consolidating all the data to create a unified view of their business, and needed a simple, self-service BI solution that would be easy to use and blend data from multiple sources.

Saint Charles wanted a solution to:

  • Import and blend data from multiple sources
  • Get actionable insightthrough reports and dashboards
  • Provide collaborative analyticswith user-based permissions

"We have lots of information in our databases. It's difficult to blend and analyze data from multiple sources using Microsoft Excel, so I was looking for a powerful BI solution. That's how I came across Zoho Analytics. I started with a free trial and I liked it."

Nick Poeschl
Co-Founder, Saint Charles

Solution: Zoho Analytics

Poeschl evaluated various BI solutions, mainly Google Data Studio and IBM Cognos, but unified data blending was a challenge in both tools. Because he also wanted a self-service BI solution to reduce their dependency on external programmers, he ended up choosing Zoho Analytics.

The company imported data through API scripts from their webshop and POS systems, and for Google Analytics, data was imported into Zoho Analytics using built-in connectors and data connectivity options.

Saint Charles had a huge amount of data and were in need of a BI solution that could integrate data from multiple sources, and analyze and compare key metrics including sales and ad data across all their online stores.

Their earlier tool, Microsoft Excel, did not meet these needs, as it couldn't handle their complex requirements and daunting tasks. Poeschl liked the simplicity of Zoho Analytics, how easy it was to create reports and dashboards, and its collaboration features across multiple devices.

Saint Charles uses Zoho Analytics for:

  • Sales analytics: Including product sales by category, daily sales vs time, top sellers, total online sales, B2B sales tracking, and more.
  • Ad analysis: Including ad spend vs revenue, click rates, conversions, and ROI analysis
  • Ad-hoc analysis:  Including production forecasts, supply chain analysis, budget vs actual, etc

"Zoho, to me, is the most comprehensive BI platform. It's hosted and allows me to deep dive into data—I don’t need external programmers to do analysis. With multiple systems, consolidating data was a challenge for us. Zoho Analytics is a simple way of consolidating data and building simple queries to create a report. We're using it as our one-stop data warehouse."

Features like unified blending of reports from multiple data tables, data visualization options, lookup functions, and interactive reports are all of great value. Poeschl also mentioned how advantageous it is to work in a hosted system, as he doesn't need to access any SQL servers.

Saint Charles also says they saved money on hiring an FTE for data analysis, thereby allowing them to invest those resources in their core business. Poeshcl also mentioned that they increased their revenue as they are now able to react better to market needs, backed by insight.

The dashboards created with Zoho Analytics are shared with 10+ users, including co-founders and leadership teams, available anytime, anywhere.

Benefits & results

  • Cost savings from not needing to hire an FTE
  • Understanding of market trends
  • Clarity on online ad ROI
  • Enabled easy creation and collaboration on reports