Reducing costs for a Global Electronics Retailer

Who? What?

ThoughtWorks were called in to help a UK-based global electronics retailer reduce operating costs and improve customer service through its in-store solution -- primarily its point-of-sale (POS) function.

Why?

The previous system was holding them back -- only 40% of the company's store staff were available to sell at any one time, so the new system was key to regaining competitive advantage. About as critical as it gets.

How?

Armed with the requirements the previous system didn't meet -- increased reliability in transaction processing, reduced maintenance and support costs, easy maintenance procedures, short upgrade down-times and increased flexibility -- we kicked off one of the largest Agile development projects to date.

ThoughtWorks, alongside the client teams, quickly ramped up to a large, globally distributed team; working through detailed requirements gathering from a distributed and multi-lingual customer team. The system was successfully rolled out in the UK, then, with local adaptations for sales processes, usability and language, to stores in France, Spain and Scandinavia. In total over 500 stores came online in less than 12 months.

The Results?

• Flexible, state-of-the-art POS system in stores
• Facilitated multinational, multilingual requirements gathering
• Identified key differences in the legal and tax frameworks, linguistic and usability differences and data format differences that would impact the successful implementation of the application globally
• Delivered applications in multiple regions that enabled them to reap the benefits of the original UK implementation.
• Immediate cost reduction as well as savings and new revenue opportunities realised within months of roll-out.

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