Littlewoods Shop Direct Group will move back office
staff to more important customer facing positions after automating
parts of its back office.
The catalogue retailer will
automate work in its
credit and collections department, part of its Everyday
Financial Solutions division, that was previously done manually
with a staff of 12.
The staff will now be assigned roles which involve helping
customers directly.
A further 20 processes have been identified for automation
pending the results of this first phase.
The merger of Littlewoods Home Shopping and Shop Direct two
years ago has resulted in a major optimisation project within the
group to harness the efficiencies of both organisations and to
develop one common IT platform.
"In any business, over a period of time things break and need
fixing and it takes a considerable amount of IT resource to support
100% of the business 100% of the time," said Steve Mound, director
of operations at Everyday Financial Solutions.
He said that the IT team recognised that the organisation's
strategic IT roadmap was creating challenges in fixing a growing
number of day to day business requests and this helped drive the
decision to
automate back office functions.
The company used software from Blue Prism called Automate to
upgrade its back office. Automate connects data in different
systems without the need for any further coding and can mash-up
different data sources and link these to automated business
processes.