Specialty Apparel Retailer to Connect 2,200 Stores to ...



Overview

Country or Region: United States

Industry: Specialty retail

Customer Profile

Charming Shoppes is the nation’s third-largest specialty apparel company. Based in Pennsylvania, Charming Shoppes markets plus-size women’s clothing through multiple brands.

Business Situation

Corporate headquarters needed to replace an inefficient paper-based system to improve communications and provide employees with timely resources that they needed to do their jobs effectively.

Solution

To connect many company locations with headquarters and deliver timely communications, Charming Shoppes implemented an enterprise portal solution based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003.

Benefits

■ Increased employee efficiency

■ Improved customer service

■ Improved employee morale

■ Enhanced companywide collaboration

■ Solution extensible to other needs

| | |“The portal will help Charming Shoppes streamline many…processes, and this makes it a great foundation for future growth. SharePoint Portal Server will help us realize important benefits on a variety of projects.”

Tony Lettera, Associate Director, Charming Technology Services Applications Intranet Team,

Charming Shoppes

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| | | |Charming Shoppes, Inc., a leading women’s specialty apparel retailer, markets clothing through brands|

| | | |that include Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug, and Catherines. The company relied on paper mailings to |

| | | |deliver internal company news and information—creating administrative burdens for corporate employees|

| | | |and busy store associates. Wanting to improve communication among headquarters, brand home offices, |

| | | |and retail outlets including catalogs and about 2,200 stores nationwide, Charming Shoppes saw an |

| | | |opportunity to create a central information source while reducing paper documentation. The company |

| | | |decided on an enterprise collaboration solution using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server |

| | | |2003. Information previously delivered by mail now is accessible and kept current through a portal, |

| | | |giving employees fast access to resources that help provide better service to more than 20 million |

| | | |customers. |

| | | | |

| | | |[pic] |

| | | | |

Situation

Charming Shoppes, Inc., (NASDAQ: CHRS) is one of the largest specialty retail apparel holding companies in the United States, with multiple outlets including approximately 2,200 stores in shopping centers and mall locations across the country. The company sells women’s apparel through brands that include Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug, and Catherines. The company also operates a number of apparel, accessory, footwear, and gift catalogs through Charming Shoppes Crosstown Traders. The first Charming Shoppes store opened in 1940 in Philadelphia, and the company’s corporate headquarters are located in Bensalem, Pennsylvania.

In addition to the company’s corporate headquarters, each Charming Shoppes brand maintains its own brand home office. The Lane Bryant home office is in Columbus, Ohio; Catherines home office is located in Memphis, Tennessee; and the Fashion Bug home office is in Bensalem, Pennsylvania. The company also operates direct sourcing offices in Asia, which procure merchandise globally from more than 25 countries. Charming Shoppes currently operates two distribution centers with the capacity for serving more than 3,000 retail outlets.

Without a central system for delivering news and information, it was a challenge for corporate headquarters to communicate to the various company locations in a consistent and standardized manner. “We needed a way to tie the different locations together and make them feel connected to the Charming Shoppes parent entity,” says Fran Davis, a Charming Shoppes Senior Analyst and member of the Charming Technology Services (CTS) Applications Intranet Team.

The company needed to deliver clear, consistent, and brand-specific information and news from its main corporate headquarters to employees at brand home offices, as well as to employees at the company’s direct sourcing organization and distribution centers. The employees needed easy access to resources including human resources information, company policies and procedures such as expense reimbursement and confidentiality, and employee handbooks. Each of the brands’ store associates needed access to similar information.

Meanwhile, district sales managers needed an efficient way to keep track of store operations including inventory, promotions, sales information, and payroll. For stores to operate efficiently and profitably, store managers and associates needed fast and easy access to critical information such as marketing, sizing, signage, store policies, and employee benefits.

District sales managers and store managers spent a great deal of time on the phone—store managers calling district sales managers to ask general questions and to find out about current events, and district sales managers calling the stores to follow up on action items after store visits. There also was a heavy burden placed on the company’s e-mail system because store managers sent reports containing large amounts of data in e-mail messages to district sales managers, who then forwarded these messages to corporate headquarters. The size of the reports adversely affected traffic and storage space on the company’s e-mail system.

Davis describes the communications challenges that the company was having with the stores: “A lot of valuable time was spent by employees on the phone, asking and answering questions that could have been communicated to many people, all at once. It was inefficient and frustrating, and left the managers with insufficient time to handle business on the sales floor, which is their primary responsibility.”

The lack of a centralized communications system created other problems, too. Visits to store locations revealed backrooms with stacks of folders containing procedure manuals, training kits, and other important information that had been sent in shop mail—paper-based mail that is sent to the stores once a week from corporate headquarters using a delivery service such as UPS. Busy employees had little time to sort through all the paper documentation to find the information that they needed. Because shop mail was delivered only once a week, there was no guarantee that it was up-to-date and accurate, even if employees had the time and ability to access the documentation.

The CTS department recognized the need for a comprehensive enterprise collaboration system that would accomplish four things:

■ Keep employees up-to-date on company news and information

■ Provide employees with timesaving tools

■ Reduce the amount of paper documentation

■ Create a more cohesive experience across the brands

Solution

The Charming Technology Services Applications Intranet Team, led by Associate Director Tony Lettera, built a test portal using Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services and delivered it to Charming Shoppes senior managers. The portal demonstrated a potential for improving processes and communications, and encouraging collaboration companywide, thus cementing executive buy-in to the CTS project.

In April 2004 and with the help of Microsoft Services, the CTS Applications Intranet Team implemented an enterprise portal and collaboration solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000, which is part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software. Running on the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system, the portal, named Up2Date, is now the company’s primary tool for delivering company news, benefits information, standard forms, and documentation, including procedures, training manuals, and department-specific information to brand home offices, sourcing and distribution centers, and stores.

The group had considered other portal technologies but chose SharePoint Portal Server 2003 because it provided the functionality necessary to meet the company’s complex communications requirements. Microsoft Services helped the group identify portal requirements, design and implement the appearance and organization of the portal, and customize the portal contents to meet business needs.

“Microsoft Services was extremely valuable to our portal implementation,” says Lettera. “The architecture suggestions and guidance that [the consultants] provided were practical and well communicated. We’re appreciative of the opportunity to work with top-notch professionals on such an important project.”

The Charming Shoppes portal needed to achieve two primary goals: Provide customized portal views to users based on their brand affiliation, and target brand-specific information to specific groups within the organization. “The portal had to look unique to employees of each division while delivering consistent corporate branding to all employees,” explains Scott Holden, Senior Staff Consultant at Charming Shoppes. “For example, Lane Bryant employees would see the Lane Bryant logo on their portal as well as Charming Shoppes corporate branding and information.”

When a user accesses a particular area of the Up2Date portal, SharePoint Portal Server Web Parts recognize the user’s brand affiliation and, using cascading style sheets, display brand-specific logos and color schemes. Based on industry-standard XML, Web Parts are the building blocks of SharePoint Portal Server sites, containing Web-based content such as text and images. Cascading style sheets are an HTML specification that allows authors to specify the appearance of page elements.

Information available on the portal includes employee benefits, corporate events, and company news. Because of the variations in benefits and the relevance of certain types of company news and events to various groups and locations, this information needed to be tailored to the appropriate employees. The audience targeting feature of SharePoint Portal Server enables the company to customize the portal experiences for users based on role, hierarchy, and interests, thereby delivering relevant information to each employee.

Charming Shoppes knew that successful adoption of the portal by each brand’s stores depended on its perceived value and ease of use. Documentation, including a searchable archive of procedure manuals and training kits, is now available on the portal, giving managers and associates fast and easy access to information that used to be buried in stacks of paper documentation.

For example, content now found on the Lane Bryant portal replaces a multitude of hard-copy documents that used to be either sent in shop mail or printed by employees from e-mail messages. Specific documentation replaced includes 3 training and procedural manuals; 10 weekly reports; 19 e-mail messages containing information about promotions, markdowns, and window and floor display changes; 81 forms including loss prevention incident forms, payroll, and new store evaluations; and 167 other documents such as construction schedules, fixture manuals, policies and procedures, and inventory checklists and instructions.

Benefits

Charming Shoppes has realized a number of benefits from the implementation of its enterprise collaboration system based on SharePoint Portal Server 2003. The portal has helped the company increase efficiency, improve customer service, boost employee morale, and encourage collaboration companywide. And because information now is available electronically through the portal, Charming Shoppes has been able to reduce the amount of paper that it sends in weekly mailings and expects to realize reduced printing and mailing costs.

Higher Efficiency Promotes Better Customer Service

The Up2Date portal has become the central source for company and brand-specific information. Because this information is accessible in one place, district managers and store managers and associates now can find information quickly and easily, enhancing their efficiency. They spend less time searching for information, can better execute their work in the field and in the stores, and have more time to devote to serving customers. “District sales managers have become more focused and proactive during their store visits,” says Lettera. “They spend more time on the sales floor with the store’s leadership team, selling clothing instead of searching for information.”

Up2Date will provide store associates with useful links to vendor sites, thereby simplifying the process for ordering store supplies. “Our Lane Bryant employees will be able to order supplies online through the portal,” says Elliot Weiss, Senior Staff Consultant for Charming Shoppes and the Project Coordinator for Up2Date. Employees will spend less time ordering supplies because they won’t have to call the vendor and navigate phone system menus, wait on hold, or explain order details. “Eliminating the time spent on the phone will allow them to spend more time on the floor assisting customers, training employees, and positively impacting their business,” says Weiss.

Better Communication Boosts Morale

The Up2Date development group has seen improvements in company communications since the rollout of the portal. Davis says, “The portal connects our separate brands and helps them think of themselves as important parts of the larger entity.” Jack Cole, Art Director for Charming Shoppes, adds, “Up2Date has improved morale both in the stores and the corporate environment. It’s become the one-stop shop for all information pertaining to the company.”

Davis describes internal initiatives that have garnered a positive response from users: “We’ve created an area on the portal called Innovative Ideas, where employees can submit ideas that they believe will increase company profits. The hundreds of ideas that have been contributed are in large part due to the collaborative environment and ease of use that people are experiencing with the portal.”

An internal survey of end users about their portal experience confirms that the new collaboration system helps make a geographically dispersed audience of employees feel connected to corporate headquarters and be more efficient in their jobs. Davis says, “We’ve gotten tremendous feedback from the stores that Up2Date has reduced the number of phone calls that the district sales managers have to make, as well as the burden on e-mail, because people are communicating through the portal and finding the information they need.”

A sampling of employee survey comments includes:

■ “I’m aware of news quicker.”

■ “I’m able to get back to the stores quicker with answers and upcoming events.”

■ “I leave fewer voice mails with my manager.”

■ “I ask fewer questions.”

■ “My district manager said that everything he was telling me was now on Up2Date. I looked and it was right smack on the page!”

Portal Encourages Companywide Collaboration

Through the portal, the stores and brand home offices are sharing information much more than they did before. Department sites include notes about transitioning floor displays to the next season, fitting information, announcements and schedules regarding building construction, upcoming promotions, and signage information.

The company is building project-specific portal sites to encourage collaboration within workgroups. In the past, project plans and information were stored on network drives, but collaboration was inhibited because not all project members had access to the drives. Now, relevant project information is shared on the portal and managers have the ability to update project information at will.

Company Has a Foundation for Future Growth

While Lettera states that the portal project was undertaken as a means of improving communication and collaboration throughout the Charming Shoppes environment, he recognizes the potential for better return on investment on projects that require information sharing. “The portal will help Charming Shoppes streamline many of our processes, and this makes it a great foundation for future growth,” Lettera says. “SharePoint Portal Server will help us realize important benefits on a variety of projects.”

The company plans to integrate other programs in the Microsoft Office System, including the Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2003 information-gathering program, with the portal. Potential future projects that may take advantage of the portal and its integration capabilities include marketing and competitive analysis initiatives, store task management, and store labor schedules. “Continuing to enhance the portal,” says Lettera, “specifically through integration with other Office programs and especially InfoPath, will give us many more options and the true ability to respond to the business needs and challenges of Charming Shoppes.”

Microsoft Office System

The Microsoft Office System is the business world’s chosen environment for information work, providing the programs, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.

For more information about the Microsoft Office System, go to:

office

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| |Software and Services

■ Microsoft Office System

− Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003

■ Microsoft Windows Server System

− Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition

− Microsoft SQL Server 2000 |Technologies

− Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services | |

© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, InfoPath, the Office logo, SharePoint, Windows, Windows Server, and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Document published August 2005 | | |

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For more information about Charming Shoppes, Inc., products and services, call (215) 245-9100 or visit the Web site at:



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