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Summary

• INDUSTRY - Clothing retailer
• ORGANISATION SIZE - Arcadia's profits for 2005 were in excess of £325m
• BUSINESS CHALLENGE - Ensure user productivity is not impacted by poor desktop maintenance
• SOLUTION - Sign up to an end-to-end desktop maintenance contract that offers ongoing cost savings
• RESULTS - Improved service levels and fix rates, significant reduction in maintenance costs, simplified supplier management
• INTEREST AREAS - Maintenance, desktop support

Customer profile

Customer overview With more than 2,000 outlets in the UK, Arcadia Group is one of the largest clothing retailers in the UK. Since its humble beginnings in 1900, the group has grown to include some of the country's best-known brands, such as Top Shop, Dorothy Perkins, Wallis and Burton.

Business challenge

Reliance on desktops for access to core applications and systems means that hardware availability has become a key concern for corporate IT departments.

Although Arcadia Group had a variety of IT maintenance contracts in place, it wanted to improve both the level of service and reduce operational costs. As Laurence Glover, Client Services Manager for Arcadia, explains: "We had a number of maintenance contracts, which were both time-consuming to manage and subject to various different service level agreements. We wanted to bring these activities under a single umbrella to not only reduce cost and complexity, but also improve our service to end users."

In recent years, Arcadia's 3,000-plus thin clients, desktop PCs and laptops at its head office had also become more distributed, which posed the company with a logistical challenge in terms of engineering resources.

Computacenter solution

By partnering with Computacenter, Arcadia has been able to consolidate its desktop maintenance contracts into a single end-toend agreement, which also covers additional hardware, such as printers, scanners, and servers. In total, Computacenter supports more than 2,500 devices at offices in London, Milton Keynes, Monkspath, Bristol and Leeds.

As well as the current maintenance contract, which runs until September 2006, Arcadia also uses Computacenter’s online procurement system to buy a range of hardware and peripherals.

How Computacenter helped

Under the maintenance agreement, Computacenter provides Arcadia with two dedicated on-site engineers, who are supported by the IT services provider's extensive nationwide resources.

Thanks to Computacenter’s multi-vendor relationships and skills, it is able to support a wide range of hardware, which in Arcadia's case spans IBM desktops and laptops, Wyse thin clients, HP printers and Symbol scanners.

As well as delivering a comprehensive maintenance service, Computacenter also adds value by assisting with configuration, hardware auditing and disposal, as well as individual projects. In the past, this has included helping with a scanner upgrade and server relocation project. "Computacenter works very much as part of our internal IT support team, and often assists with activities that go beyond the letter of the contract, which is testament to its flexibility and commitment to customer service," comments Laurence.

Regular management reports and meetings also provide Arcadia's IT team with valuable desktop support data, which helps with ongoing service improvements and systems availability

Results

These reports help Arcadia track Computacenter’s performance - for more than three years it has exceeded the monthly contractual SLA of 95 per cent. "Computacenter always puts business continuity first and will focus on fixing a problem as quickly as possible," comments Laurence.

As a result, Arcadia is able to ensure that the efficiency of key users is not impacted. "If a user's desktop fails at a critical time within our financial year, we need to be able to guarantee a rapid response. Computacenter’s experience and the maturity of the contract enables us to meet these needs and provide quality and reliable desktop services to the business," adds Laurence.

The seven-year partnership has also enabled Arcadia to dramatically reduce its IT operational costs, as Laurence explains. "By working with Computacenter we have been able to decrease both the complexity and costs associated with supporting our IT desktop infrastructure. In the last four years, we have saved more than £200,000, which we have been able to re-invest in strategic IT activities. We have also been able to free up internal resources, by outsourcing third party supplier management to Computacenter, which helps ensure continuity of service."