CIOIN

Executive summary

In growth mode and wanting to touch base with customers across the globe, Specsavers, the world's largest privately-owned opticians, needed to get to the market quickly. A standard deployment model gave the company the power to cover more ground faster.

Specsavers is in a period of growth powered by an IT strategy aimed at producing a common customer service through global partner agreements, like the services deal signed with Fujitsu Siemens Computers Infrastructure Services (FSC) in October to support Specsavers' further global expansion.

By producing this standard deployment model for Specsavers' IT, the FSC deal lets Specsavers open a new store in less than 11 weeks, anywhere in the world. "We've just rolled out 100 stores in 100 working days in Australia," says Specsavers' CIO Michel Khan.

Global homogeny is also preserved by a £4.5 million (about Rs 3,600 crore) WAN management deal with network operator Vanco (now Reliance, (not to be mixed with the Indian Reliance Group), signed in February for a five-year term.

Even before these deals were sealed, Specsavers' growth far exceeded its projections. In 2005, the company's vision was to have 1,000 outlets and achieve £1 billion (about Rs 8,000 crore) turnover by 2010. The company had already asked Open Source services group Sirius to create a centralized access control model for their UK workstations and network services.

Beyond Borders

Specsavers is the island's largest private employer, employing 650 people out of a population of 60,000, and despite some limitations of island life, there are no plans to move IT operations or the global datacenter wholly to the UK.

"There are challenges. Guernsey is an island, so it has a finite work pool. Telecommunications links are finite too, although with the Vanco network we're able to get much more bandwidth. In addition, each territory has a small IT unit of 10-20 people comprising a service desk team with business analysis skills and its own datacenter, which is linked back to the central systems on Guernsey.

"Twelve years ago, when everyone else was looking in a different direction, we went for IP technology as our WAN," he recalls. "It was quite immature then, but it has stood us in good stead. It's got better and everyone's got IP today. One of the first things we do when we go to a country is to link the IP up, get the network in place and put a videoconferencing in so that whoever goes out there can meet with us easily."

Khan is in his thirteenth year at Specsavers, joining in January 1996 when the company had only 180 stores and very little in terms of a coherent IT strategy. A survey established that Specsavers had six million customers, and their profiles and buying habits were stored in a database that's still going strong today, 12 years and 14 million customers later, and now feeds into a retail marketing system that sends out 250,000 letters a week. "We're still using the same database we started 12 years ago. It's sustained its life and it has scaled," says Khan.

Eyeing Incentives

His achievements have not gone unnoticed in the industry. Khan was awarded the Albert Heijn Lifetime Achievement Award at the Global Retail Systems Awards in 2005, and the IT Director of the Year at the 2005 Telegraph Business Awards. Specsavers' IT team recently won the Retail Systems Award for IT team of the year, mainly thanks to Specsavers-in-a-box and the Australian roll-out. But whether an award is personal or for the whole IT team, Khan agrees that it reflects well on Specsavers.

"It's the peer group recognition for the Specsavers IT team. It's not a one-man band, hence the team of the year award. But it does help within the industry for other people that look on Specsavers IT and see that there is something leading edge, highly skilled and sophisticated here, so I think it does help our recruitment."

Over the next 12 months, further expansion is the aim. A follow-up to Specsavers-in-a-box is in the pipeline in the shape of a common manufacturing process. With the company selling 18 million pairs of glasses a year, and a revised target of 2,000 stores on the horizon, the plants, like Khan, are bound to be busy.