Fashion Retailer Automation Project

During a client engagement that had several national and global subsidiary brands, we discovered 2 costly errors within 3 months.

The IT department implemented a misconfigured Novel ZENworks platform (now owned by Micro Focus). Ironically, one of the selling points of this tool is to increase operational efficiency and reduce IT costs.

1) The tool was deploying live code and patches on POS (Point of Sale) systems during store hours:

This led to hundreds of stores randomly going offline, resulting in in-store sales losses. Identifying root-cause led to additional savings (unfortunately) through staff reduction in the call center that was built out over several years to deal with the fallout from a faulty implementation.

Within months we identified the CI / CD pipeline (live code deployment) jobs that have been in place for 3 years. In additional to significant in-store revenue loss recovery, this led to an immediate positive cost impact amounting to:

19 employees * ~$35K/year = ~$665K saved a year

Annualized: (3 years) ~$2M

While we advocated for utilizing freed up staff time elsewhere, leadership opted to reduce headcount. Partnership engagements often involves streamlining operations that either replace something or someone inside or outside of the organization.

2) A 2nd issue identified was misconfigured time zones across numerous POS systems. This resulted in many devices being returned to the home office for system re-installation / reconfiguration. This incurred cost in staff time, additional hardware and shipping.