Matalan Gains Comms InSight
One of the UK's biggest Clothing and homeware retailers has implemented Triangles Retail Manager to improve Retail processes and achieve a step-change in internal communications. The InSight solution has helped Matalan increase efficiency while reducing operating costs and the business expects benefits to be realised within 2 years.
Andrew Weir, Matalan head of retail operations said: "We wanted to introduce one very clear communication channel whilst reducing traffic on the others; to improve quality of communications, visibility of task execution in stores and reduce communication costs. We wanted to help stores prioritise and manage critical information and key messages. Ensuring time saved at the back of house increased the quality of our customers shopping experience".
"We went live in October 2006 and are currently reviewing the removal of fax machines from stores, a big win in terms of taking costs out of the business."
Matalan has used a six year old store intranet system, but this had become out of date. "We chose Retail Manager for a number of reasons" says Weir, "The Intranet was effective up to a point but simplistic – users needed a road map to work through it. We wanted people to love the system."
Retail Manager provided the retailer with key new communications capabilities including complete task visibility and the ability to manage tasks at store level, enabling stores to understand and manage priorities – considered one of the 'biggest wins'. It also helped head office collate information in a tenth of the time, with the store Attributes database providing time and resource savings.
With the system now embedded in Matalan's business, implementation continues. "We are far from finished – this is an on-going project," said Weir. "We want InSight to continue living and breathing. This means looking at what's good and what's not, working with Triangle to make it even better and continuing to involve the absolute buy-in we had from the stores from day one. In many ways are success has energized us. The system is going to get bigger and better."
September 2007
