Major changes lie in store for Harrods IT

World-famous retailer moves on to next stage in overhaul of its technology infrastructure

Luxury retailer Harrods is moving to the next phase of an IT infrastructure overhaul, having successfully revamped many of its core operational systems.

The London department store has already replaced several legacy IT systems, allowing it to use modern technology that better supports its business strategy.

And IT service levels have been improved for operations such as tills, enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain and helpdesk support.

Harrods chief information officer David Llamas says the company is now entering the next phase of the transformation programme that will bring performance benefits to the business.

‘We are moving towards being more reactive and making better business decisions,’ he said.
The store’s recent IT investments include an application integration suite from Sun Microsystems, which will be used to streamline business processes and improve company efficiency (Computing, 26 January).

‘We will have more information shared online and be able to react faster,’ said Llamas.

The Sun Java Integration Suite will allow the company to maximise existing investment in core systems, and enable projects to improve business agility, enhance customer experience and generate multi-channel growth.

‘Through the technology refresh we have moved from improving our service levels to an increase in operational excellence in our front and back-office IT environment,’ said Llamas.

‘The next step is the most strategic one, because it involves supporting the decision-making process directly.’

Llamas says the Java integration project will link key business information.

‘It will help analyse customer behaviour, improve the support of IT in decision-making and enable the use of predictive models for more effective campaign planning,’ he said.

Harrods has spent the past three years overhauling and replacing legacy IT to improve performance and support company growth strategies.

‘The IT strategy has been aligned with the business,’ said Llamas. ‘We have five different areas that we focus on as a company: employee satisfaction; enhancing the luxury and innovation of the brand image; becoming a modern retail store; exceeding customers’ expectations and increasing productivity.’

The use of standardised technology components brought a 31 per cent reduction in calls to the helpdesk from 2003 to 2005.

And the move to a new human resources (HR) payroll system from vendor Kronos will improve administrative accuracy and simplify staff scheduling.

‘The Kronos piece is part of the people management programme we are running,’ said Llamas.

‘This will affect payroll, HR and staff security access, as well as time and attendance systems.
‘We have updated the networks, migrated onto blade server technology, and even overhauled our desktops.

‘The till system upgrades in our stores and restaurants have increased our general merchandising capabilities, and one of the first things we did was to consolidate the legacy operational systems onto an ERP platform from SAP.’