Central England Co-operative (CEC) is one of the largest independent retailers in the UK, with over 400 trading outlets, a workforce of around 7,800 employees and more than 250,000 regular trading members.
Central England Co-operative
Project Scoping
CEC needed to upgrade their Learning Management System (LMS) with an aim to improve employee engagement and report against mandated training more accurately. A project of such a scale requiring data migration, integration, employee testing and rollout would be no small feat. CEC engaged Nine Feet Tall and their team of expert consultants to map this out, defining and streamlining the data and processes to be migrated to the new LMS.
Delivery
Nine Feet Tall facilitated a course of workshops with key stakeholders to pinpoint the needs of the new LMS, identifying minimum data set fields, data integration, and prior recognised learning requirements. Project activities, such as requirements of people data, content needs and migration, and reporting, were consolidated into a systems requirement specification report. This allowed all key stakeholders to approve and sign off on various functional requirements, accelerating the project delivery within tight timescales. As a result of an accelerated and successful start, Nine Feet Tall were requested to continue supporting through to User Acceptance Testing, a phase ensuring all new systems were tested by the end user prior to ‘go live’.
Outcome
Nine Feet Tall accelerated the delivery of a new LMS, Kallidus, now integral within the CEC infrastructure as well as achieving the forecast ‘go live’ date on tight timescales. CEC now have a Learning Management System which is more engaging and intuitive to the user and allows for deeper insights in reporting and tracking of mandated training, ensuring industry training compliance.
Hear more about the project from Co-op here.ERP solution
Further to their LMS project, Co-op sought the help of Nine Feet Tall to upgrade its ERP and Range & Space Planning solutions. In the midst of a Retail Business Transformation Programme, Co-op looked to Nine Feet Tall to assist in the pre-initiation scoping and planning of key programme activities. The aim was to ensure that CEC’s understanding of internal processes and structures were in place to effectively implement future-state system transformations, whilst aligning the delivery plan to compliment other key projects in-flight.
Nine Feet Tall took on the programme management role, including the planning, governance, RAID management and delivery of the change. Key to the success of the project was the co-ordination of Co-op’s current-state internal process mapping, looking at all areas which would be impacted by the Retail Business Transformation programme and identifying process owners and change control procedures to support the change. This was supplemented by the identification of key data flows and exchanges across business areas to enable a full ‘to-be’ gap analysis.
Furthermore, Nine Feet Tall assisted with wider business priority projects and change plans. This ensured that effective sequencing was achieved based upon resources, capacity, and solution dependencies.
Through collaboration with CEC, Nine Feet Tall were able to effectively manage the resources, governance and planning of their Retail Business Transformation programme to set them up effectively for future delivery. Furthermore, and significant to future transformations, Nine Feet Tall identified key dependencies within CEC’s wider business priority projects and were able to propose the most effective alignment of delivery timelines.
Nine Feet Tall provided us with a thorough assessment of our portfolio. Their assessment was clear, quick and helped us to determine what was feasible to deliver within our resource and budget constraints.
Liz HanshawCentral England Co-Op
