Comprehensive Discovery and Review of UK Retailer’s IT Capabilities Ahead of the Next Period of Phased Expansion

Retail

Value Highlights

This independent designer, manufacturer and retailer of women’s clothing was distributing through c. 70 branded retail outlets across the UK and Republic of Ireland, as well as through telephone, email orders and a customer website portal. The business had already commenced their digital transformation journey pre-Covid-19 lockdowns and had benefitted from sales growth via their digital e-commerce platform, which was increasingly selling abroad. Understanding that their technology strategy and use of data needed review and further support, Panamoure was invited to review the company’s data strategy, provide recommendations for enhancing their internal IT capability and to further support the senior management team in the development of an IT Roadmap.

What Were the Challenges?

Company leadership team had identified a number of business goals to be achieved within operations and the customer facing side of the business, which would achieve significant efficiency savings and needed to be prioritised and planned accordingly
However, there was no senior IT Leadership presence within the business’s e-commerce operation and there was no Technology Roadmap in place for the business
Systems had evolved tactically over time and had not been designed or implemented strategically. Panamoure’s CTO quickly identified there existed a number of significant business constraints that need to be better understood as part of the analysis phase of the discovery element of the project
There was a mixture of Cloud, hosted and third-party solutions within the systems architecture model for the e-commerce operation that required untangling, to better understand the business’s challenges
This part of the business operation also suffered from poor user experience, a significant volume of manual operations in terms of delivery capacity and feedback
There was also an over-reliance on delivery operators’ tacit knowledge of routes and operations, as well as incomplete integration of company website with mapping technologies
Distribution communication was also identified as needing an upgrade

So, What Did we Do?

For this initial engagement, Panamoure provided a combination of CTO-as-a-Service and a Discovery session before the CTO engagement
We reviewed the client’s existing technology landscape in order to document the “as-is” business model in substantially greater detail
Through Discovery, we developed a comprehensive understanding of the long-term technology vision and requirements for the business and were able to determine a realistic timeline for change
Presented a comprehensive report to provide the client and Panamoure’s CTO the opportunity to understand together the true “ground zero” state of the organisation
The report provided a detailed description of the current “as-is” IT landscape, suggestions and recommendations with respect to IT infrastructure, applications and capabilities, with an emphasis on early “quick wins”

Results

As a result of this “first review” engagement, Panamoure was invited to establish a full IT Portfolio Review, IT Organisational Design, IT Service Improvement Plan and IT Strategy and Roadmap