4-page Case Study - Posted 9/1/2008
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House of Fraser Reduces Its Carbon Footprint with Integrated Communications
Leading retailer House of Fraser wanted to improve its operating efficiency and competitiveness with technology for integrated communications, presence awareness, and video conferencing. After considering solutions from a specialist video conferencing vendor, the IT team chose Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 because it is easy to deploy and use, and offers value for money. Following a successful pilot programme, technicians are extending the system throughout the business. House of Fraser staff members are adopting new ways of working that have vastly improved communication and speed in organising product launches, training, and e-learning. Reconciliation of month-end accounts—which previously involved store managers travelling for meetings and spending two days off site—now happens using video conferencing tools without leaving the store, vastly reducing the company’s carbon footprint.
Situation
As one of the best-known retailers in the shopping malls and high streets of the United Kingdom (U.K.), House of Fraser, founded in 1849, operates 61 stores including its flagship branch in London’s Oxford Street. Its shop floors offer a vast range of designer fashion and include many well-known global brands. House of Fraser, with 6,500 direct employees and 10,000 concession staff, has grown rapidly as a business with the acquisition of other leading stores. Annual sales exceed £1.25 billion (U.S.$2.5 billion).
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Through the use of these tools, employees on the move will be able to, for example, go to their hotel rooms when away from their workspace, connect to the Web, and have a truly secure mobile office complete with VoIP for telephone calls. |
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Chris Randall
Network Services and Retail Support Manager
House of Fraser |
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The “credit crunch” has challenged the resilience of the major players in the global retail market by slowing output, raising costs, and reducing business expectations. House of Fraser is no exception, but takes strength from its underlying business values and company ethos—which Chief Executive Officer (CEO) John King identifies as, “great customer service and great brands.”
In response to a mandate to improve business agility, in 2007, a team headed by Duncan Gray, Director of IT Services for House of Fraser, started to look at ways of improving internal communication through technologies such as video conferencing. Initially, this was intended to cut the travel budgets and improve the organisation’s carbon footprint.
Another core requirement was to provide better tools for the company’s training operation. Rob Carpenter, Training Manager for House of Fraser, adds: “We run a national programme of training for our stores, which combines traditional classroom work with e-learning through a dedicated computer terminal. But, increasingly, the combination of the two was not flexible enough to meet the needs of a modern retail business, where fashions change rapidly and new promotions or product launches are rolled out regularly.”
House of Fraser was determined to improve communication to drive greater efficiencies and help its people connect more effectively.
- The finance team in Glasgow needed to reduce the time and costs involved in the monthly accounts reconciliation.
- The data centre in Swindon needed a collaboration technology to stay in touch more easily with London-based colleagues.
- According to a project planned for the future, a key requirement was to speed up product turnaround and reduce supply chain leakage with the House of Fraser vendors in Turkey and the Far East.
From the accounts side of the business, Fred Jefferiss, Retail Finance Manager, House of Fraser, says: “Once a quarter, all the General Managers (GMs) meet up for a Profit and Forecast sessions in London. For the GMs based in Dublin and Glasgow, this was a serious inconvenience due the cost of air travel and time away from the business. We also wanted to produce much more accurate data, and improve the pace of our reaction to any trends in turnover figures.”
Finally, a major opportunity had also arisen to change the culture of the organisation. Gray explains: “With the move to new premises in London for our Store Support Centre or head office, we had the chance to introduce newer, more efficient ways of working for our 454 staff through advanced communication and collaboration technologies.”
Solution
In its search for a solution, House of Fraser initially considered investing in specialist telepresence and high definition video conferencing equipment. However, Gray’s team felt House of Fraser would benefit more from video equipment that included fully integrated communication and collaboration tools and integrated with its existing investment in Mitel.
For its new Store Support Centre in London, House of Fraser had already invested in the Mitel 3300 MXe IP communications environment, and was aware of the partnership between Microsoft and Mitel in delivering advanced applications for global communication and collaboration. House of Fraser is also running Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Server, Active Directory® service, and Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 collaboration and communication technology.
However, the turning point came when the House of Fraser IT and networking team listened to a 90-minute presentation and live demonstration of instant messaging, peer to peer audio/video communications, Web-conferencing, and telephony integration from Microsoft using Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. “We immediately realised the power of the communication tools that would be available to us in a very short window of time,” recalls Gray. Following this, the CEO was impressed with the solution and business sponsors were involved to evaluate which functionality was needed by House of Fraser.
The Mitel Live Business Gateway provides telephony to Office Communications Server 2007—a session initiation-based presence and collaboration server. The Live Business Gateway integrates the Communications Server and Mitel applications using an OCS Edge Server to provide access to key business resources in the moment they are needed because there are plans to use Office Communications Server 2007 remotely—OCS Edge Server solves any network address translation issues.
The result is faster decision-making and problem resolution through the following features:
- Integrated communications. With Office Communications Server 2007, House of Fraser has integrated communications with the security, manageability, and reliability required for a major enterprise.
- Telephony enablement. Office Communications Server 2007 users can use the call feature (remote call control) to initiate calls from their Mitel desk phone to any other internal or external telephone number. Incoming calls are flagged to the users via the pop-up incoming call window. Users can answer the call or forward it to another destination at the click of a mouse. In future, House of Fraser is looking to take advantage of the soft phone capabilities of Office Communications Server 2007 and to eradicate the use of desktop phones.
- Presence and availability. Office Communicator 2007 client users can see an indication of the status of other users on the network, including their telephone status. If a colleague is busy on a call, he or she can be “tagged,” so that notice is sent when the call is completed. The presence icon is also integrated into Microsoft Office Outlook®, offering “click to communicate” functionality.
- Web conferencing. The capability in Office Communications Server 2007 provides on-premise Web conferencing to users. Web conferencing offers a virtual meeting experience that integrates data, content, video, voice, media, and text to provide an environment for real-time communication and collaboration whenever it is required.
- Integration with Microsoft Office suite. Missed calls are flagged in the user’s Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 inbox. A user’s status is clearly visible within Office Outlook 2003 or the Microsoft Office suite through Exchange Server 2003.
For its three principal business centres, House of Fraser has also invested in Microsoft RoundTable™, an advanced collaboration and conferencing device used with Office Communications Server 2007. RoundTable provides a 360-degree view of a conference room, high-quality audio, and video that tracks the flow of conversation among multiple users.
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With the move to new premises in London for our Store Support Centre or head office, we had the chance to introduce newer, more efficient ways of working for our 454 staff through advanced communication and collaboration technologies. |
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Duncan Gray
Director of IT Services
House of Fraser |
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Before the full implementation, House of Fraser worked with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Preferred One Stop Technologies (POSTcti), a value-added distributor and unified communications specialist, on a 60-user 60-day trial to evaluate the solution. The trial, in November 2007, involved a cross section of users from throughout the business, including human resources, marketing, finance, training, as well as IT. Adrian Sturdy, Account Manager, POSTcti, says: “The pilot went so well that instead of waiting the full 60 days, the customer placed the order prior to the completion of the trial.
Benefits
House of Fraser is opening up the connectivity power of its Mitel telephony system—initially at its new Store Support Centre—by combining it with Microsoft unified messaging technology. Employees have embraced new ways of working that have vastly improved communication and collaboration, especially in the training and finance departments. Regular tasks such as reconciling the month-end accounts now take less time and cost less to complete. They no longer routinely involve store managers travelling to Glasgow for face-to-face meetings, helping the organisation to reduce carbon emissions.
Improves Communication and Collaboration for Employees
Software-powered Voice over IP (VoIP) is the next generation of voice communications that, when combined with unified messaging technology, helps to change a business for the better. Office Communications Server 2007 supports communications over an IP network and integrates these capabilities with the applications used most by busy office workers. Sturdy says: “Voice communications can be integrated with e-mail, calendaring, and Web conferencing to provide a streamlined experience rather than the disconnected experience that was provided by older technologies on the market.”
Rapid Drop in E-Mail Traffic
Among the users involved in the pilot were Carpenter and Jefferiss. They both at first worried that staff might see integrated communications and presence awareness as “chat gimmicks” rather than as tools to improve collaboration within the business. But Chris Randall, Network Services and Retail Support Manager at House of Fraser, says: “There was a fairly rapid drop in e-mail traffic as employees began using integrated communications for quick queries instead of pinging e-mail messages backwards and forwards, creating huge message streams.”
Increases Productivity Rises
Randall adds: “What we will end up with is far greater productivity. Through the use of these new tools, employees on the move will be able to, for example, go to their hotel rooms when away from their workspace, connect to the Web, and have a truly secure mobile office complete with VoIP for telephone calls.”
Additionally, House of Fraser employs various externally-based consultants who will become integrated into the unified communications system, and, as a result, will find communication easier and more flexible to their own ways of working.
Supports E-Learning and Training Offer
At a time when House of Fraser needs to sharpen its customer service offer to cope with global competition, the new technology is supporting the training and personal development strategy of the organisation.
Carpenter says: “We’re not abandoning classroom training and there will still be traditional events for product launches, but employees can log on to e-learning from any computer. Additionally, we can deliver specialist training through video conferencing. The new technology will also make it easier to communicate messages from the company directors, and information on promotions and events, to all staff.”
Reduces Carbon Emissions
House of Fraser directors have introduced various policies and “green” practices to cut the organisation’s carbon emissions as part of a range of corporate social responsibility initiatives.
Both Jefferiss in Finance and Carpenter in Training expect to save money and reduce carbon emissions, because of lower travel budgets in closing the accounts and delivering training packages to remote locations. Jefferiss says: “When closing the monthly accounts with our Glasgow team, we now have the capacity to work through a structured agenda using Web conferencing. We have all the relevant items and documents to hand, and the need for face-to-face meetings has already reduced greatly—saving time and costs.”
Gray adds: “We can’t provide figures as yet, but as an organisation, consuming less energy is a major priority and Office Communications Server 2007 will play a major part in supporting this agenda.”
Microsoft Office System
The Microsoft Office system is the business world’s chosen environment for information work, providing the programs, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.
For more information about the Microsoft Office system, go to:
www.microsoft.com/office
For More Information
For further information about Microsoft products and services, please visit:
www.microsoft.com/uk
or call 0870 60 10 100*
For hearing impaired customers with a Minicom, contact: 0870 50 30 400*
*Lines are open 8am–6pm, Monday to Friday. Please note, numbers prefixed 0870 will be charged at national call rates. For details of national call rate charges, please contact your telecommunications provider.
For more information about Preferred One Stop Technologies (POSTcti) products and services, visit the Web site at: http://www.postcti.com/
For more information about House of Fraser products and services, visit the Web site at:
www.houseoffraser.co.uk
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published August 2008
