Patrizia Pepe wished to improve the logistics of their warehouse: accepting incoming goods from their production sites, movement of items throughout
the warehouse, and packaging of goods for distribution to the retail locations. They initially tried to use barcodes for this function. Because barcodes must be individually scanned within a line-of-sight, the acceptance of goods coming into the warehouse was too time consuming. Working with the University of Florence, Patrizia Pepe instituted a five-month pilot project beginning in August of 2009 to test the validity of an RFID solution. The pilot involved tagging of about 60,000 items for the second seasonal collection, and convinced the company to move forward with tagging all items.

One of the main challenges was that the company required a centralized data warehouse for unified reporting and analytical requirements. The data was not consolidated properly and its structure was not suitable for user requirements. Besides, reporting process was extremely slow. Individual systems had expanded to the point that information was no longer stored and presented in the centralized manner that could facilitate efficient organizational decisions across the company as a whole. It was also becoming obvious that a data warehouse should better enable internal and external user access to data and increase the performance of analysis and reporting activities. To evolve its offering from simple data feeds to self-service BI, the company needed a new robust platform that could enable users come out of excel mindset and could take them to exploratory mode for better and faster decision making. The objective was to integrate the line of business applications (On-Premise and SAAS).