Our part-time IT Director ensured the success of this company’s business model transformation. They instilled a completely new approach, focusing on data with a brand new tech stack, a new business model was formed.

Company Profile

A mid-sized manufacturing company, that was looking to transform its business and become an e-commerce retailer. Period of significant transformation and strategic change was happening at this company. The change required data, digital, IT and brand transformation. 

CEO’s Mission

The mission was to bring about a fundamental change in business proposition and to own the whole value chain and be a manufacturer as well as a retailer with its own distribution channels. Aiming for a complete change from a B2B business model to a predominantly B2C business model.

What Our Director Did

Set Up The Tech Stack To Support The Business Model Transformation

The IT Director led the strategic review of the existing infrastructure, people, processes and data. This resulted in a new organisational strategy focused on data. The first port of call was to audit and subsequently recommend the right data and technology stack to lay the right foundations for the B2C model.

Working with the CIO, a comprehensive tech stack recommendation and investment case was provided to ensure optimal data capture, setting up a single source of truth, master data management, improvement in data quality, new data governance processes and flow of data to different sub-systems. All this laid the foundations for data, analytics and data science to be much more embedded and suited for the new operating model.  

Set Up A New Team With Relevant Skills And Capabilities  

In line with the transformation goals, the Director clearly highlighted the skill areas that the business needed. The IT Director identified the skills and categorically divided into the following.

a) KPI and MI

b) Strategic Analytics and Market Research

c) Digital Analytics and

d) Predictive Modelling and Data Science.

Comprehensive job specifications and the role profile was written and eventually people with the right skills were recruited and retrained. The Director recommended the optimal mix of internal and external skills required.  

Automation And Self-Serve Culture 

The key objective was to ensure data and insights reached every part of the business.  This would help all functions to use data to drive or support decisions with confidence. In order to do this, a massive enterprise-level project was undertaken to drive focus on automation of processes in order to make data accessible and to help people across the organisation self-serve. The Director introduced and worked with partners and external vendors to help adopt best practices. Worked with other leaders on change management communication and worked with HR to introduce a training plan to drive data literacy.

The Results

The analytics and data science strategy was signed-off in full and the Director was kept as an Interim to lead the deployment of the whole strategy

  • Brought enterprise-wide business change to support the new B2C business model
  • Fundamentally changed the culture taking the organisation on a journey to becoming a true data-driven organisation
  • Embedded data and analytics in the decision architecture of the company where no major decision was taken without strong data and evidence
  • A new Data and Insight team was set up with the relevant skills recommended
  • Data and Analytics centre of excellence was set up with collaboration from various teams
  • Analytics guided the company into product and market diversification thereby growing international revenues and profits
  • Significant improvements in operational performance as a result of automation
  • Key management reports were set up with the right KPIs, much of it is was automated
  • Dynamic pricing models helped to increase revenue
  • Overall, 2020 was the best ever year commercially for the company on record
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