Supporting the transition to a product focussed company

Wilko the retailer is a British high-street retail chain that sells home wares and household goods. The company was founded in Leicester by James Kemsey Wilkinson in 1930, and remains in the ownership of the founding family. Wilko has over 400 stores across the UK with products that include homewares, DIY, gardening, petcare, health and beauty, and food employing over 15,000 people in the UK.

Wilko approached Autodesk and Cadline to tender for their business to introduce a platform that could manage their processes, data, people and the global suppliers. Fusion Manage was chosen and the project was awarded to Cadline after reviewing tenders from several other vendors and suppliers.

Wilko supplied a detailed functional requirements document which captured all the key needs from each area of the company from the retail teams, quality, IT for which the platform had to conform to and support the functionality along with the required security protocols demanded by the IT security team.

As a part of a business strategy of ‘better retailing’, the company wanted to firstly formalise and construct robust business processes whilst removing the heavy use of Excel. Rather than just simply digitising an existing process and transferring that into an electronic process. Wilko wanted to take the opportunity to review the individual processes being managed with Fusion Manage and look to streamlining and improving the information captured.

Secondly, the reduction of their critical path development for product conceptualisation to the shelf which was typically 70 weeks needed to be reduced more in line more with an industry standard of 26 weeks.

Finally, they wanted to manage their global complex supply chain through controlling product quality information and processes with what information they received on each of the products manufactured on their behalf.

Wilko purchased 100 Fusion Manage Enterprise subscriptions which included 500 3rd party subscriptions for their suppliers to access the PLM platform from anywhere in the world.

Cadline delivered over 150 days of professional services to help define, create and deliver a fully configured platform tailored to Wilko’s requirements. As a part of the project Wilko also wanted to integrate Fusion Manage with their ERP system SAP which holds all the product article data and supplier information. This allowed article data to flow from SAP into Fusion Manage so that suppliers then could add the product and material make up data they are required to collect, store and manage by law.

The initial phase of the project was held in 9 sprints focusing on retail critical path workspaces initially moving onto Quality & Packaging. KIN a sister company, which is made up of award-winning team of product designers was also encouraged to adopt the platform to manage their NPI processes.

Wilko and Cadline agreed that a strong piece of upfront work to brief teams on the product and then to review the specification in detail would pay dividends. Jointly the two organisations developed the agreed objectives, arguably the Wilko team have said this was the most critical time in the project and would be a recommendation for others to follow:

‘Taking the initial tendering requirements and then in reality reviewing these with the user teams and Cadline was critical and relatively straight forward and with great teamwork between the two organisations was seamless and created a slightly revised but essentially ‘real-world’ set of deliverables aligning to Wilkos business scope and Moscow requirements.

Once key requirements were all locked down further workshops were then run with key process stakeholders at each sprint stage to provide an agile development processes to map, document, build and deploy each section required as we move through the project.

Three key fundamentals made the engagement impactful for Wilko.

Collaboration

Cadline became a partner, not just a supplier or vendor. They worked closely with us, they challenged us, in fact at times they disagreed with us, and that’s what we wanted, a critical partner, an experienced partner that could support us reshape our thinking. Its changed how we work and collaborate with our supply partners, and Cadline supported us through that journey.

Agile build

The PLM project with Cadline was our first major agile product deployment. It was a challenge at times, but arguably it wouldn’t have succeeded without being agile as the Wilko team evolved in our thinking as we moved through the design, delivery and implementation.

Team experience

Cadline are world class and dedicated to supporting the client, they have supported us through the challenges, given valuable experience to shape our design and deployment and ‘all’ the team that started on the journey completed the journey with us.