Carpetright Adopts FastReact Project Management software for Stores 'Rollout' Project
The Company
Carpetright PLC is Europe’s leading specialist carpet and floor covering retailer trading from over 500 stores and concessions in the UK, Republic of Ireland, Holland, Belgium and Poland
The Challenges
Carpetright is in the process of rolling out a new stores solution, to their entire UK estate. This involves the installation of new hardware, desks and telecoms, followed by the implementation of the software training and solution .
The total lead time for each store, including preparation and training is around 90 days. At any one time, the project involves many stores at different stages of the process and requires the individual activities for each store to be coordinated closely with other stores in the same region.
Given the sheer volume of stores, the rollout is expected to take a year to complete and involves extensive use of subcontractors, including an external training company to support the process.
Effective coordination of activities between the numerous subcontractors, internal staff and stores personnel is a major challenge. This challenge is compounded by the timing of certain activities being dictated by external service providers, such as telecoms installation dates. As these activities are outside the control of the Carpetright team, dates can change quickly and have a major impact on the scheduling of other activities.
Coordination errors and the rescheduling of deliveries and contractors is expensive and can soon lead to additional costs.
Having developed a rollout monitoring spreadsheet during the early stages of the project, it soon became apparent that it was too cumbersome, prone to error and would not be able to cope with the complex nature of the project. Carpetright then researched other options and found a general absence of market solutions, which could handle the large volume, multi-project scenarios.
Fastreact was able to help……
The Solution
Using highly visual and easy to read FastReact planning screens, the project team have total visibility of the exact progress of each store and others in the same region, throughout the project.
The use of pro-active ‘critical path’ for activity/task management, (including proactive task diaries) enables latest priorities and schedules to be communicated quickly and easily to each key person, store and subcontractor on a regular basis. This ability is essential to effectively control a multi-project environment where changes occur frequently.
FastReact highlights any potential problems as soon as they occur, in most cases enabling corrective action to be taken, thus improving the overall efficiency of the project.
The benefits to Carpetright include:
- Total visibility of the status of all stores throughout the project.
- The ability to retain effective control of the entire process at all times.
- More accurate, proactive communication with stores and sub-contractors.
- Less business disruption during the rollout process due to clear priorities and less rework.
- Significant reductions in the cost of rescheduling and rework, primarily by site subcontractors and the external training company.
- Overall, improved on time completion and efficiency throughout the project.
The Conclusion
Mr Ian Woosey, Group IT Director commented "It was evident from our early research that it would be difficult to find a market solution to cope with a project of this scope and magnitude, particularly with such a significant number of stores and a wide variety of regional subcontractors and service providers to manage. Having reviewed FastReact it was clear that this was the best tool for the job and the implementation, at our Head Office in Rainham was achieved effectively and in a very short period of time”.
Andrew Brown, Managing Director of Fast React Systems added “This is an exciting development for FastReact to be used in a total project management capacity. It became obvious very quickly that FastReact provides an extremely good fit to this environment. Above all, we were able to provide total visibility, coordination and control to the project very quickly. There are many potential areas that we can add further value. We look forward to working closely with Carpetright to ensure the very best use of the FastReact solution on an ongoing basis, including potentially the ongoing stores opening and refurbishment program".
