When you’re an established global luxury brick-and-mortar retailer, with more than a century of success under your belt, how do you respond to the threat of online retail? Well for one major retailers in Europe, the answer was “head on,” with an aggressive expansion strategy into emerging high-end retail markets, including mainland China. With a history of being a pacesetter, the tony retail chain saw no reason to stop now. We spoke to them to learn more about how they use Clarity.
What were the challenges you needed to overcome to be successful?
We needed to both improve effectiveness and efficiency internally to compete with online retailers, and drive our global expansion to increase our physical footprint. To do that we identified three areas of focus:
- The need for greater insight across the entire project lifecycle, including work, teams and budgets.
- Achieving better capacity planning to maximize resource utilization.
- Delivering more precise budgeting, especially of labor costs, to clearly define business benefits.
How did you go about addressing those problems?
We decided early on that we needed an integrated project portfolio management (PPM) solution to help us integrate all of our projects, connect investments with work being done, and provide greater insight into what was happening. After an exhaustive analysis we chose Clarity as the best solution for our needs and used an implementation partner to roll out the tool.
What did you do, and how did it help?
Instead of focusing on work and outputs, our 600 plus users now concentrate on delivering business outcomes – ensuring the company achieves an effective return on all project investments.
Our executives build strategic roadmaps with the easy to use, drag and drop roadmapping functionality. Our project managers manage their updates easily and quickly and our stakeholders can check resource assignments and status in real time. Critically, all users are seeing the same information in a context that works for them.
That allows us to make better decisions – like the ability to assign resources across multiple portfolios based not on outdated plans, but current availability, skills and locations. That in turn gives us razor sharp budgeting and improved ROI, which is exactly what we need.
How is this driving your success?
Within just a few months the benefits we have seen are significant:
- We have a clear understanding of how each investment is performing with less organizational fatigue from fewer status meetings.
- We have optimized business value, improving the certainty of scheduled future work and identifying opportunities for ad hoc initiatives.
- We are making more informed decisions as we grow our footprint around the globe and across China.
By simply comparing each month’s changes in Clarity, we quickly get an understanding of where we are and what needs to be done. With the strategic roadmaps, the executives and different teams are all aligned with the company’s goals.
If you’re going to face challenges head-on then you need the right people in your corner. With skilled employees, committed executives and the power of Clarity, this retailer is ready for the next century of its history!
