Supporting the digital transformation of one of the country’s favourite online retailers

| minute read

For more than a decade, we’ve partnered with leading fashion retailer N Brown,  providing critical support to the company’s 1,200 employees nationwide, helping to meet the needs of 2.2 million customers, and facilitating over seven million orders a year

The challenge  

N Brown is a leading UK digital retail platform for clothing, footwear, home and technology,  best known for its JD Williams, Simply Be and Jacamo brands. In 2016, it embarked on the largest  business transformation in its 160 -year history – with a move to become a digital -first retailer.  To ensure the success of its new strategic direction, N Brown needed a technology partner it  could rely on for its critical IT services and infrastructure.  

The solution  

Our end -to-end service wrap covers all of N Brown’s critical IT systems, including its customer  facing websites and warehouse processes.   It involves round -the-clock maintenance, support and monitoring, using cutting edge tools and  dashboards. This 24/7 support ensures N Brown’s warehouses operate smoothly, and customer  payments are processed day and night.

We oversee hundreds of servers – both physical and virtual – on multiple operating systems. These underpin the organisation’s business critical applications, including its logistics, finance, and marketing systems.

Our team of software engineers in the UK and India undertake design, development, testing, and support a wide range of mainframe and Windows/cloud development platforms.

And, our teams are responsible for operating N Brown’s telephony systems, whether that’s the customer contact centre, head office, or warehouses, whilst also managing its customer mailing systems. 

The result 

We operate N Brown’s IT Service Desk, handling around 2,000 requests every month. Together we’ve delivered continuous service improvements and enhanced user experience – reducing incidents by over 80% in the last 10 years, thanks to proactive problem management and increased automation. Similarly, today, more than eight in ten calls are fixed first time.

At the same time, our ongoing support for N Brown’s modernisation programme includes the successful migration of many legacy workloads and applications to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

 
Chris Williamson, Group Director of Technology at N Brown, said: 
We’ve been able to trust Sopra Steria to manage some of our most important digital systems and infrastructure for more than 10 years. 
It’s essential for a business like ours to find a tech partner that provides a consistent, first-rate service and year-on-year improvements. We’ve been able to count on Sopra Steria for over a decade as we continue to modernise our IT estate.

We support:

  • 825TB of data
  • Over 600 servers
  • 340 network devices
  • Over 2,000 end user devices (Windows & MacBooks) 
  • 160,000 batch jobs/file transfers

digital-transformation

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