Phones 4u case study

Requirements

Phones 4u use an intranet as a primary means of communication to their retail outlets around the UK. It is a key business application that is active on at least one terminal in every store at any given point in time. It provides the following key information:

 

  • Whole store operations manual - contains all operating procedures for running one of the stores.
  • Address book
  • All special offers and store bulletins.
  • Full HR policies procedures and documentation.
  • Access point for corporate management information systems.

 

Their previous intranet was created and maintained by two full-time developers. This however was causing some difficulties:

  • Insufficient flexibility
  • Unable to cope with required throughput
  • Not good use of skilled resource
  • Weekend changes difficult to implement

Solutions

Phones 4u looked at the market place to evaluate alternative Content Management solutions and met with Immediacy at one of the trade exhibitions. They started with a short list of six vendors, and then narrowed it down to two.

 

They did more detailed evaluation, got product demonstrations, did a proof of concept exercise, and ultimately selected Immediacy.

 

Why?

Above all, it was ease of use of the system. After seeing the system the business owner of the intranet site said "I could use that"  - and could see that it was intuitive and that it would not be intrusive into his day-to-day workload.

  • Ease of use of the system
  • Speed with which users could become productive
  • Speed of deployment
  • Technical compliance with the environment
  • Cost 

 

Results

Key results so far include:

  • Content owned by areas
  • More updates, more frequently
  • Freed-up developers
  • Communications delivered more efficiently
  • Actioned at stores
  • Clearer structure to the information now far easier to find what you need on the system

 

Initial feed back from field managers:

"The new system makes it far easier for my store to access the information they need, and for me to be sure they are acting on it.  The new features makes managing compliance simply a matter of logging on."

 

Initial feed back from store managers:

"It's great. It's quicker and more intuitive than before, and we can find our way to what is important more easily"

Implementation

The following illustrates the time-frame within which Immediacy was installed and operated:

 

  • Purchase agreed early March 2003
  • Specification agreed end March
  • Implementation 3 weeks
  • Testing 1 week to end April
  • Training 3 days
  • Content creation and migration > 1000 pages - 3 weeks
  • Internal roll-out - 27th May
  • Roll-out to all branches 8th June 2003

Features

These are some of the key Immediacy features activated on the phones 4u intranet:

 
  • News + Archiving of news or other sections
  • Page Live and Expiry Dates
  • Meta Data
  • Word/Excel Import
  • My Favourites
  • Membership & Page Properties
  • Daily Bulletin
  • Personalised log-in
  • Usage tracking