Littlewoods is consolidating its nine retail brands on
to a new online platform to cope with anticipated growth in online
sales from £400m to £800m over the next three years.
The consolidation project will complete the integration of
Littlewoods and Shop Direct, a home shopping business that it
acquired in 2005.
Littlewoods' new platform comprises largely in-house developed
applications based on IBM's Websphere service oriented architecture
running on Sun's Solaris operating system. It operates Oracle and
Teradata databases and uses call centre software from
Chordiant.
Littlewoods has already moved three brands - Great Universal,
Littlewoods and LX Direct - on to the platform. This involved
transferring more than 1.6 million customer details.
Another three brands will be moved over in time for the
spring/summer 2007 season, and the remaining brands will go live
for the autumn/winter 2007 season.
Littlewoods CIO Martin Wyke said, "The migrated brands have
outperformed expectations. We were concerned that we might have
damaged the customer experience."