Aaron's Inc.

Achieving complete visibility into operations through advanced analytics. Well, joining us today to speak about that, John Treanor, CIO and Senior Vice President Digital Products at Arons. John, welcome. Thank you, Russell. It's good to be here. John, for anybody who might not be entirely familiar with Arons, just what it does, walk us through that for just a moment, what's the space that it operates? Sure, we're a specialty retailer. We are in most states of the U. S. , as well as Canada, about 1,600 stores, and we lease furniture, electronics and appliances, so broad spectr Absolutely. In fact, we complicated a little bit because we do rentals. We also bring products back, so it adds another wrinkle to our supply chain that a lot of retailers don't have to deal with. And you have an online component as well, in addition to the physical stores. Absolutely. You can go to arons. com and lease the exact same products. Okay. Well, I want to talk about the relationship that Arons has with Halo and its solution, but let's back up for just a bit. As I understand, the relationship is about six years or so old, but prior to that, characterize for us, if you will, what was going on at Arons? How were you doing things before you began to partner with Halo? Well, Halo is analytics platform. So the analytics that we did was very rudimentary. It was just standard reporting, very simple reporting. Frankly, a lot of n We delayed getting that information, typically, for several days sometimes. Typically, we would just not know enough information. And when we did get it, it was in a format that was very difficult to cons So I can see that we've got delays information. No doubt you've got inaccuracies in certain reporting. Walk us through then the real downside to that. What was it costing the company to experience that kind of a scenario? So it was tough to make a decision as business got more complex. It was actually okay to have that analytics weakness for the first part of the time I was at Arons. I've been there about 19 years now. So for those first 10 years or so, it was probably okay for us to have that because our process was very simple. Were just putting up store after store and growing. But then the business got a little bit more difficult. And so it meant that we needed to know more about our business more quickly. And when we solve a problem, we needed to be able to drill into that problem and understand it more deeply. Okay. So then some six years or so ago, Halo enters into the picture for you. I'm ass What led you to partner with Halo? So I've been looking at products for years knowing that it was something that were going to need to invest in. I just happened upon Halo, somebody that I knew through a technology association in Georgia was the Account Exec at Halo. And what was great about it is as a solution, it really fit our needs well. It was right sized for the needs that we had. So the right level of nimbleness for what we needed, the right level of agility for what we needed. And part of the solution meant that we needed to go to every associate in the field. So we had 10,000 employees that we needed to show these dashboards to. It was able to scale and it was able to be licensed in a way that really matched our exact need. So let's talk then about the modules that you have implemented. What exactly is Halo doing for you today? Yeah, basically two things. We load all of our enterprise data with Halo and then we visualize all of our enterprise data with Halo. So a lot of people think of Halo as that front end piece, the ability to visualize the data. We certainly use that and we use that heavily. We also get a significant amount of value out of the part that loads the data warehouse and loads all of our cubes to do the analysis. And so we use both components. Now if somebody were to say to you, walk me through the benefits that you and Aaron's are experiencing. Tell us why this investment that you made in this implementation was a wise one. What are you getting out of it? So as I mentioned with the business getting more complex, we really needed to understand what was going on. So now what we get is we get visibility typically by 8 a. m. in the morning. You have all of the information from what happened yesterday and you have it in a way that it rolls up for all of your stores, all of your regions, all your divisions. We also are able to delve into exactly what's happening for our customers, for their agreements and specifically for the products that they have. So we now have this certain level of insight and control over our analytics that we never had before in a way that when we roll out a new system or when we are trying to solve a business problem, we're trying to gain adoption on something in particular, we're able to put that into Halo and then we're able to monitor it and then we move the business based upon the measures that we put into Halo. Well John, as you describe it, clearly the relationship with Halo has been a profitable one for the last n Thank you for meeting with us today. Thank you very much. As John Trainor, Aaron'speaking with us today about achieving complete visibility into operations through advanced analytics.