How Ted Baker's digital transformation helped drive sales

Global retailer Ted Baker found that its ecommerce platform alone wasn't sufficient to satisfy demanding customers in today's competitive environment

Looking to streamline and automate complex business processes, improve efficiency and meet changing customer expectations, global retailer Ted Baker has spent the past few months embarking on an organisation-wide digital transformation.

"Our customers demand omnichannel, click and collect, and next-day delivery in many parts of the world; the most cutting-edge, fashion-forward product in-store and online; and an almost legendary level of product quality that surpasses many of our contemporaries," says Stuart Carrison, head of IT at Ted Baker.

"This translates into a set of IT challenges around performance, availability, real-time integration and by-the-minute visibility into customer and product sentiment, as well as financial performance and assurance around the integrations between our various channels and our distribution facilities."

Data was quite raw and accessible only to those with ecommerce platform systems access - a pretty small number of skilled team members

In the past, visibility was provided solely via Ted Baker's ecommerce platform. But this presented a plethora of challenges.

Carrison explains: "Data was quite raw and accessible only to those with ecommerce platform (Hybris) systems access - a pretty small number of skilled team members.

"A lot of time was spent taking this raw data and reformatting its presentation in tools like Excel. Dozens of spreadsheets would fly around the office, usually via an overburdened email system and, of course, the data was pretty much out of date the minute someone hit send."

Therefore, in a bid to more quickly provide access to information to the people who needed it, Ted Baker implemented an all-in-one monitoring, visualisation and alerts solution from LogicMonitor.

Integrating with the organisation's network infrastructure and business processes, the platform offers staff in the business a live dashboard of key metrics, such as how many orders have been taken online but haven't yet made it to the warehouse; how long an order has remained in a warehouse; and, which stores aren't hitting revenue targets.

It also provides an AIOps [AI for IT operations] Early Warning System, giving IT teams the tools to predict and prevent IT infrastructure outages before they happen.

Teams right across the organisation can access these metrics on any device at any time, providing them with insights into both the overall business operations and the health of IT elements. This, according to Ted Baker, has enabled it to beat revenue targets across its 360 stores worldwide, as well as its website, while also improving customer satisfaction and business efficiency.

Another consideration for Ted Baker has been ensuring compatibility across its IT estate. "Ted's core IT infrastructure is relatively industry standard with names like Cisco, Cisco Meraki, HP, EMC, Microsoft and so on featuring as you'd expect," says Carrison.

Dozens of spreadsheets would fly around the office, usually via an overburdened email system

"As an environment, we are truly global with offices and stores around the world, connected via a private SD-WAN [software-defined wide-area network] that is managed by the regional IT groups.

"We have key private data centres in the UK and US, and public cloud across Amazon and Microsoft for some applications, including our ecommerce offering, CRM and Ship-from-Store."

Streamlining data

Since implementing the dedicated monitoring system, Ted Baker staff have access to more streamlined data and insights, making it easy to make improvements across the business. "We now look at data in the ERP system [Microsoft Dynamics AX] once it has been successfully processed and interfaced via Mulesoft from the ecommerce platform," says Carrison.

"With LogicMonitor's platform, we are able to quickly build views that focus on what is relevant for the group reading or viewing the dashboard, rather than huge, detailed reports that have some data relevant to a very large audience."

We use cheap devices like Raspberry Pis to drive the screens, and cloud-deployed kiosk applications (via Balena) to manage them

These insights are also more accessible to everyone in the business, meaning they can enable change across the business much faster. Carrison says: "Data is live and viewed in web browsers, on phones and tablets, or on the large screens we have strategically placed in our offices and distribution centres around the world.

"We use cheap devices like Raspberry Pis to drive the screens, and cloud-deployed kiosk applications (via Balena) to manage them.

"In essence, we have drastically improved awareness of how all of the systems involved in servicing our customers needs are performing, and up-to-the-minute insight into Ted's financial performance. We drive key business decisions using this data, making Ted a much more efficient operation."

Broad deployment

Originally, Ted Baker's plan was to roll out the solution to just its IT team. However, as the deployment has been such a big success, it's now available to other departments. "We now provide live, large-screen displays for executives, marketing, e-commerce, distribution and logistics, finance, wholesale, and of course IT," continues Carrison.

"LogicMonitor dashboards can be seen in all three of our global distribution centres in Derby, UK; Atlanta, Georgia; and Hong Kong. Additionally, our UK headquarters, which houses over 800 team members, has enough screens across the three floors that you can stand almost anywhere in the office and see at least one."

Ted Baker's customer contact centres, located in the US and the UK, also make use of this software. Carrison says: "They rely on LogicMonitor dashboards to manage workload through myriad support channels, including phone, Twitter, email and so on. Our offices in New York, Los Angeles and the UK all feature LogicMonitor visualisation displays, tailored to the specific needs of the teams that work there."

Data is live and viewed in web browsers, on phones and tablets, or on the large screens we have strategically placed in our offices

He adds that almost everyone in Ted Baker now spends some time looking at the dashboards, whether they realise it or not.

He tells Computing: "Whenever warehouse workers walk into their jobs, they see a number. The bigger the number, the harder they are going to need to work, or the more colleagues they will need in the warehouse!

"Store and area retail managers monitor store performance versus their targets through LogicMonitor. Our wholesale team manages their prospect versus conversion targets, and aggregates wholesale sales from a region, country, continent and global view."

Looking ahead, Carrison expects adoption to continue across the business.

"I am sure new dashboards will be built as we develop and integrate new systems. For example, our recent Ship-from-Store project was supported during development and monitored since go live on the LogicMonitor platform."