The Client

The Clientis a fashion retail chain founded in the 1980s.Today it has a turnover of more than £3 billion.

Its website which serves more than 60 countries around the globe.

It has more than 400 stores in the UK and Eire and around 180 stores in countries overseas.

This project involves the documentation management for all of these stores and all of the other estates that The Client rents or owns.

The Challenge

In 2011, after a recommendation from another client, Crimson were invited to tender for an opportunity to organise and improve the way The Client stored its estates management documentation.

These documents, some electronic, some in hard copy, includedthousands of emails, deeds, tenancy agreements, and planning documentsamong others.

Due to the volume of documents, many of which were stored in hard format, The Client was struggling to access the documentation that its team needed quickly. The whole system needed categorising.

What’s more, a large percentage of the retailer’s systems were bespoke,difficult to integrate because access was restricted, and needed upgrading.

The Client’s IT team was also finding it difficult to utilise the full capabilities of its existing Microsoft SharePoint 2007 system.

The Strategy

Crimson decided that we needed to create an innovative solution that would streamline The Client’s estate documentation logging, storage, and retrieval. We also planned to instil processes into the company that would ensure user adoption.

Our number one goal was to solve The Client’s problems by findingthe path of least resistance for users. We installed document management software Harmon.ie to make it easier for users to add emails and documents to Microsoft SharePoint libraries.

We then held workshops with the users to ensure they understood the new simplified processes and software.

ROI

Crimson succeededin improving The Client’s document management procedures and created an electronic system that closely followed those procedures.

This not only saved the company a huge amount of time, and consequently money, but also improved its ability to manage its legal work quickly and effectively.

In 2015, The Client invited Crimson to takethe documentation project further. We are now providing our Microsoft SharePoint consultancy service and upgrading The Client’s Property Team Document Management Solution from Microsoft SharePoint 2007 to Microsoft SharePoint 2013 with Office 365.

The aim of this upgrade is to not only give The Client’s estates team an enhanced user interface but also to provide easy access to information in Office 365from data held in an external database. This property data is automatically synchronised with data stored in SharePoint. This improves the user experience allowing one place to view the most important information and alleviates the burden on The Client’s older systems.