How Lilla S.p.A. Built a Unified Data & BI Platform for Retail, Finance, and Store Performance
Context
Lilla is an Italian multi-brand fashion retail company operating a network of physical stores. Its offering spans clothing, accessories, home textiles, and lifestyle products. The company manages:
- Thousands of brands and SKUs
- Multiple seasonal collections
- Complex supplier and payment structures
- Store-level performance and foot traffic
As the business grew, Lilla's leadership recognized the need for a centralized, automated approach to business intelligence: one that could bring together operational and financial data into a single, reliable source of truth.
The Challenge: Fragmented Data Across Every Business Function
Disconnected Systems and Manual Reporting
Lilla's data was spread across multiple systems, point-of-sale terminals, ERP, financial software, and traffic counters, with no integration between them. Key challenges included:
- No unified view of sales, margins, and inventory across stores
- Finance teams relying on manual Excel consolidation for payables and receivables
- Store performance data (traffic, conversion) siloed from commercial data
- Seasonal planning based on intuition rather than data-driven forecasting
Limited Visibility for Decision Makers
Leadership lacked the tools to answer fundamental questions about business performance: which stores were truly profitable, which brands drove margin, and where operational inefficiencies were hiding.
The Solution: Centralized Data Warehouse with Automated Analytics
Data Architecture
Expecta designed and built a centralized data warehouse on Azure SQL Server with a layered structure:
- Landing layer: raw data ingestion from source systems
- Staging layer: business logic and transformations
- Production layer: star schema for optimized reporting
Automated Analytics & Reporting
Retail & Sales Analytics
Comprehensive dashboards covering sales by brand, category, store, and time period. Margin analysis, sell-through rates, and inventory turnover, all updated automatically.
Finance & Payables Analytics
Automated accounts payable and receivable reporting, aging analysis, and cash flow visibility. Replaced manual Excel processes with real-time dashboards.
Store & Traffic Analytics
Integration of foot traffic data with sales metrics to calculate conversion rates, average transaction values, and store-level benchmarking.
The Results: Complete Business Visibility
With Expecta, Lilla achieved:
- A single source of truth across retail, finance, and store operations
- Automated daily reporting replacing hours of manual Excel work
- Store-level profitability analysis for the first time
- Brand performance tracking across 5,500+ brands with margin visibility
- Traffic-to-conversion analytics connecting footfall to sales
- Cash flow visibility with automated aging and payment tracking
- Scalable architecture ready for new stores and data sources
Lilla now operates with enterprise-grade analytics capabilities, enabling data-driven decisions at every level of the organization.
"Expecta transformed how we understand our business. For the first time, we have a single view across all our stores, brands, and financial operations."
— Management Team, Leadership – Lilla S.p.A.
Why this matters for Retail Organizations
This project demonstrates how a multi-store retail operation can gain unified visibility without replacing existing systems:
- System integration without disruption: connecting POS, ERP, and finance without changing existing workflows
- Store-level intelligence: understanding true profitability at the individual store level
- Automated financial reporting: eliminating manual consolidation while improving accuracy
- Embedded partnership: ongoing BI support that evolves with the business
By building a centralized data infrastructure, Lilla gained the clarity and control needed to make confident, data-driven decisions across their entire retail network.
Ready to Build Your Own Success Story?
Book a 30-minute discovery call. We'll assess your data landscape and show you how Expecta can deliver the same results for your organization.