IT improvements underpin The Works omnichannel growth

The Works reports that, by automating its warehouse operations, it has increased its productivity by 60% and is set to continue its e-commerce growth. The discount retailer, which is understood to be considering a £100 million float on the London Stock Exchange, worked with IT consultancy eSpida to implement an upgrade to its virtual servers, storage and security to improve distribution to its network of over 400 physical stores and e-commerce business. The project has since led to The Works moving to a new head office in Warwickshire.

"We've been opening one new store per week for the last three years and we needed a new platform to help us do this," says Tom Scott, IT Director at The Works. "Our e-commerce business is now handling 30% more transactions like-for-like compared to the previous year. eSpida helped us to make crucial upgrades to our IT infrastructure to improve our capacity and our ability to deliver fast, accurate distribution and stock management to our network of 440 physical stores, up from 280 stores three years ago.”

He adds: “We are now 60% more productive with the same sized team. Where our infrastructure team was previously spending 80% of its time on support activities and only 20% on new business development, we've been able to flip this so that 80% is now spent on new development projects. The increase in capacity means we can spend more time as a business thinking more strategically. It has given us better use of a new development environment for testing new software; we've been able to upgrade our email system and roll-out better encryption in preparation for GDPR."