Tags Bottom Line, Growth, Change

Investing in a brighter future

Graham Wood of BrightHouse Stores explains how IT investment can pay great dividends, if handled properly. Pat Sweet reports.

Some businesses like to do things differently. Take BrightHouse – it’s a fast-growing business based on a “rent to own” concept that was brought over to the UK from the US a decade ago. The first store in the chain, which was originally called “Crazy George’s”, opened in Birmingham in 1994 and the company now has 140 shops in major cities across the UK.

So far, so normal. However, BrightHouse targets a very specific retail market sector: cash or credit constrained customers who would like to buy big-ticket items, but who may not have a particularly good credit rating. Typically, these customers will be paid their wages in cash on a weekly basis, and may not possess a credit card, which means most could have difficulty obtaining credit in other high street stores. Rather than relying on traditional credit scoring methods, BrightHouse has its own internal vetting process, which is used to assess whether or not to take someone on as a customer. The “rent to own” contract is typically over a three-year period.

The stores stock a large range of brown goods, such as televisions and DVD players, white goods including washing machines and fridges, and also furniture. Once customers have signed up for a product, they visit one of the stores each week to make their regular payment, which builds customer relations and also allows local managers to manage debt.

When it comes to recommending the technology infrastructure to support this unusual business model, however, where do you begin? As far as Computer Services manager Graham Wood is concerned, he has three key concerns in mind – to keep costs down, preserve as much flexibility as possible and ensure resilience.

“We had an ISDN network, but two-and-a-half years ago, we migrated to an ADSL network. With the ISDN network, costs were spiralling and we had little control,” Wood states. “In addition to saving network costs of over £250k per year, we were able to provide a much higher bandwidth to our stores.” This was only the beginning.

Taking the right step

As for planning future IT strategy, David Clifford, IT director points out, BrightHouse has invested in an “industrial strength” enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, from Intentia, which will provide a robust base for the company’s operations, and offer greater flexibility going forward, by moving to centralisation on an iSeries platform.

This will move BrightHouse away from the plethora of small point solution applications that were already in place in the Stock and Service area of the business. BrightHouse has also recently introduced a corporate intranet based on specialist Web content management software called Domisphere, supplied by IBM Business Partner Infosys.

“Back when we started, the business was very small and almost like a family, so everyone knew what was going on. Now it’s grown enormously and with around 1,400 staff, it has a very different feel. We wanted to use our IT investment to improve communication around the company,” Wood explained.

In its first phase, the intranet offers staff access to largely static information, such as company policies and procedures, the internal telephone directory, the internal magazine and, very importantly, a weekly bulletin on the latest news and information of interest to staff out in the shops.

“Before, we were producing the weekly bulletin on paper and posting it to the shops, so all the photocopying, stuffing envelopes and mailing took up a lot of time. The intranet will repay the investment in a very short time, and provide substantial other benefits for the company,” Wood claims.

Future plans for a second phase include adding much more dynamic content to the intranet, such as Sales Day Competitive Updates as well as payroll and personnel details. Staff will be able to change their address details online, for instance, or check holiday pay.

Moving forward

Ian Stewart is managing director of IBM Business Partner Infosys, which was responsible for the analysis, design, development, implementation and support for the intranet. He believes the “start small but build for later growth” view that BrightHouse has taken has a lot to commend it.

“Our software allows companies to build libraries of re-usable resources such as logos, images and content, which can be used in different websites and for different purposes,” Stewart explains.

In BrightHouse’s case, it lets the company offer employees a taste of the information they can view via the intranet and to see how they get on. Once everyone has grasped the value of what’s on offer, adding extra information to the intranet can be done easily by non-technical staff. Employees will be able to use exactly the same browser interface to access the new data, so no additional training will be necessary.

Best of all, it’s a flexible system. It’s possible to use Domisphere in the future to create a corporate portal, which would incorporate information from other sources and act as a gateway to a range of browser based collaborative tools, to offer a more comprehensive working environment and on-line resource.

“When we were a smaller company, if the business changed, it was relatively easy for the IT systems to match what was needed. Now the whole question of development, testing and so on is much more complex and there are more interfaces with back-end, legacy systems,” Wood points out.

“The challenge for us is to keep pace with the business as it grows, but without creating a huge overhead. We want to invest in systems that will offer not only an immediate return, but also a way forward for us in the future,” he concludes.

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