Unifii powers a global fashion retailer’s digital transformation

A multinational fashion retailer – with headquarters in Ireland and over 400 stores across 15 countries – has turned to ServiceNow Elite partner Unifii to support its digital transformation efforts.

The retailer had been struggling with an outdated ticketing toolset for managing IT support incidents and workflows. With 70,000 staff on its books, this was negatively impacting employee efficiency.

Following a detailed consultation with business process experts Unifii, it was decided to align IT service management with the company’s overarching digital transformation strategy. This resulted in the design of a new set of processes and the deployment of ServiceNow, a cloud-based platform that provides a range of solutions for streamlining and automating business operations.

The retailer has seen a radical transformation in IT service management. In the first month alone, the key business metrics realised for the project have exceeded expectations.

More than 12,000 IT support incidents have been processed. Some 98 per cent of those incidents were re-routed to virtual agents automatically, negating the need for manual intervention.

More than 500 self-service knowledge-base articles have been published to assist staff with incident resolution. Multi-lingual support, in the form of eight language translations, is now available for employees across the globe.

Labour-intensive, manual procedures that were spread across applications such as Word or SharePoint have been retired

Labour-intensive, manual procedures that were spread across applications such as Word or SharePoint have been retired, resulting in more streamlined business operations and reductions in cost.

Commenting on the project, Andrea Wallace, director for Ireland with Unifii, said, “The foundations for project success lay in collaboration with the client. From the outset, we took the time to conduct detailed interviews with all stakeholders and to listen intently.

“A number of workshop sessions were held where together we explored the system design. Our business process expertise and roadmap guidance have laid a solid foundation for the customer’s digital transformation and the project has been a resounding success,” she said.

Secret to success

The project commenced with a thorough examination of the customer’s existing IT service management operation, looking at the platform, the processes and areas of critical concern such as process inefficiencies, platform performance gaps and weaknesses in user experience.

The vast majority of users at the retailer (81 per cent) expressed the need for a swift, efficient tool to solve their problems while 88 per cent said they wanted chat functionality, to offset the volume of emails they were receiving on a daily basis.

“Having taken this feedback on board, we set about determining project scope,” said Wallace.

“We looked at elements such as incident triage, knowledge management, service reporting, change management and performance analytics. We then worked together to define a set of processes to best fit the retailer’s workflows.”

Implementation of the ServiceNow platform was conducted as a phased transition, supported by 42 hours of training for staff. Some 13 further integrations were added to achieve the level of user experience required by the client.

“We live in a world where the fine-tuning of business processes can move the dial from loss to profit,” said Wallace.

“At Unifii, we’re acutely aware of the need for optimised business operations and have a deep understanding of the market environments our clients are working in. We’re encouraged that following the success of this project, our retail client is now exploring the possibility to extend ServiceNow to include more non-IT business areas.”

Unifii is a ServiceNow Elite partner with consultants in-country. The company works with some of Ireland’s best-known brands in retail, food production, engineering and IT services and deploys complex projects in areas including IT asset management, IT service management, supplier lifecycle management and more.

See unifii.ie