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.
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That allows us to make better decisions – like the ability to assign resources across multiple portfolios based not on outdated plans, but current availability, skills and locations.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!
Alf Abuhajleh
Alf Abuhajleh markets Clarity by Broadcom. From early-days cloud computing, mobile apps and cognizant enterprise apps, Alf spent the past 25 years developing and launching emerging technologies in Silicon Valley.
Other resources you might be interested in
The Silent Sabotage of Configuration Drift
See how manual network changes lead to configuration drift, which can cause security holes, compliance violations, and network outages.
AAI - Configuring & Responding to Jobstream Alerts
This course walks you through how jobstream alerts work in AAI, and how to tailor them to your workload needs.
Rally Office Hours: November 20, 2025
Get the scoop on the latest Rally updates, including new AI features, customizable planning boards, and essential tips for managing service accounts and custom views.
AAI Fundamentals
Gain a solid introduction to Automation Analytics and Intelligence (AAI)—a powerful platform that unifies and optimizes automated workflows across complex IT environments.
Is Your Network Modernization Frozen by Fear?
See how the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mindset delays many network modernization projects. Employ network observability and migrate with confidence.
The Seven Wastes of Network Operations
Discover the seven common areas of waste in network operations, and see how network observability helps you systematically eliminate this waste.
Your NOC's Most Important New Skill? Ignoring Things
See why collecting more data has backfired, creating alert fatigue and burying critical problems in noise. Harness observability to focus on what’s relevant.
Rally Office Hours: November 13, 2025
This session featured a product announcement of the new Rally AI chatbot, a Q&A about defect count roll-ups and the ability to impersonate a user, and a segment on upcoming events.
AppNeta: Create Monitoring Policies for Active Monitoring
Learn how to create and configure monitoring policies in AppNeta in order to set up active network and web application monitoring.