The Carphone Warehouse

logo_cpwThe Carphone Warehouse is Europe's leading independent retailer of mobile phones and services, with over 2450 stores in 9 EU countries and 1,000 Best Buy Mobile locations in the US. Over the past 5 years, The Carphone Warehouse has built up a significant Telecoms business, which already contributes half of the Group's revenue and is set to be a major driver of future profitable growth.

Challenge

  • Having been a victim of its own success, The Carphone Warehouse's organically grown eCommerce system had become unstable with only 80% availability.
  • Internal IT was wholly focused upon keeping the live system up to date, leaving little time for system development.
  • The full engagement of all stakeholders and partners would be required in order to produce required results.
  • No matter what, the live system had to remain available 24/7 under all circumstances.

Project Scope

  • An initial report was produced, putting forward a 12 week plan to resolve the most critical underlying problems.
  • With board level input an implementation strategy was put in place to ensure the live system remained fully operational for the duration.
  • A hot team of experts drawn from within The Carphone Warehouse and external specialists was established to identify and implement necessary enhancements.
  • Test and Development environments were built with 100 real-world examples used to test and analyse the results.
  • Enhancements were only progressed to the Live system once the Head of Production had given his agreement.

Business Benefits

  • The new eCommerce system increased business by up to £200K.
  • Within 12 weeks The Carphone Warehouse's eCommerce system had been stabilised and overall availability increased to 98%.
  • Permanent staff gained new skills and were able to take on performance tuning duties.
  • Full development and test environments established and handed over, enabling The Carphone Warehouse to continue improving their solution over time.
  • Best practice and commonly accepted standards were introduced to allow The Carphone Warehouse to use external staff with a minimum of overhead.