At Runsvengruppen, a group of companies which includes the chainstore ÖoB Överskottsbolaget, business was being run almost entirely with no form of IT support apart from at head office. There was no storage of business information, and most communication between head office and the stores took place by fax, post or phone.
“When I started here in 2006, there was actually not all that much IT to be head of! This is probably one of the reasons why making this step forward, implementing a very modern infrastructure which supports our business operations more effectively, has gone so smoothly. We were able to aim directly for our target instead of having to take into account old systems and structures,” says Peter Adell, Head of IT at Runsvengruppen.
This trading group employs some 1650 staff in total and has 80 or so shops and department stores all over Sweden. Its turnover amounts to around SEK 3 billion, and most of its sales take place via its own chainstore, ÖoB Överskottsbolaget. When Peter Adell arrived at Runsvensgruppen, the company was running two fairly old business systems. These were managed centrally but were not integrated with one another. From one system, the company printed out long lists of information on products and stock balances.
These lists were then posted or faxed to the stores and used for orders. The second system was used purely as a financial system for ÖoB. Manual management demanded a lot of man-hours, and postage costs amounted to hundreds of thousands of kronor every year. In those days, the only Internet connection for the company was at head office.
“It was problematic for store managers to manage all the lists,” says Peter Adell. “Even though the methods and systems were oldfashioned, they still managed to keep track of all the information. But that said, safeguards against disaster were far from perfect. We made backups and even had a reserve system at head office, but this was simply not enough.”
Peter Adell’s first task was to start outlining a general infrastructure for IT – looking at both hardware and software – which also covered all stores. He wanted right from the outset to create a virtualised server environment to ensure optimum server utilisation.
“I had been in touch with Proact before, in other regards, and I was well aware of their solutions for virtualised environments where storage is mirrored to a different site. It went without saying that we decided to ask Proact for a proposal, and their solution was unbeatable compared with what their competitors had put forward.”
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