The adage “Home is where the heart is” has been a bedrock of America for nearly a century, representing the emphasis that we place on living spaces. The best homes contain elements that speak to the presence of family while also offering individuality from room to room.
For home improvement vendors, their passion is helping homeowners move closer to accomplishing their remodeling dreams. With so many items to choose from, store associates and leadership must have easy access to product inventory, collaboration tools, and customer information to provide the best recommendations for completing the job. Such was the challenge of one home improvement retail leader as they looked to enhance their digital assets.
Remodeling the Retail Experience
Our client is one of the leading home improvement retailers, operating nearly 2,000 chains in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. With almost 300,000 employees, management had no way of managing store metrics or personalizing communication between employees. Furthermore, their technology assets consisted of 30 different applications, causing frustrations and inefficiencies preventing positive store experiences. In management’s discussion, they decided a unified solution was necessary if the company was to innovate and provide a better customer experience.
We were called in due to our deep understanding of digital transformation in the enterprise and our background in building portals. From our past client work, we believed that upgrading their implementation of IBM WebSphere Portal from v6.1 to v8.5 to enhance web content distribution and introducing DevOps/continuous integration to speed up service delivery and possibilities for innovation.
An Upgraded Tool Belt for Better Results
We were able to achieve our goal of helping our client unify their different technologies while creating increased visibility into store performance. This will allow management to further understand how to address their retail strategy, view sales summaries, and address customer needs on a more agile and responsive basis. Additionally, the implementation of DevOps and continuous integration also means that employees can login into all of their applications through a single sign-on.
For employees, an upgrade in technology means an upgrade in productivity. The added collaboration tools allow employees to manage their financial and health benefits while providing a single view to all employee information.
Your Turn: How else do you think we can leverage portals or cloud solutions to improve the retail experience? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
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