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View from the Top - Part
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PROFILE
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David Llamas
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Company: Harrods.
Interviewee: David Llamas.
Job Title: IT Director.
The Subject: The world’s most
glamorous retail store has adopted new SOA-based systems
– but could it convince users of the benefits of such
advanced and complex technology?
PERSONAL FILE
NAME: David Llamas.
BACKGROUND: Before joining
Harrods in February 2003 as enterprise applications
controller, David worked for 11 years as a consultant
and ERP programme manager in retail and other industry
sectors. In April 2005, he took up his current role
at Harrods of IT director, responsible for technology
infrastructure, business applications, business intelligence,
e-commerce and telecoms. In 2005, he finished an Executive
MBA from the London Business School..
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Q: WHAT IS THE BUSINESS CONTEXT FOR YOUR
EAI PROJECTS?
A: Harrods has the vision of becoming a ‘predictive enterprise’,
an agile company driven by business intelligence (BI) that
can respond better and faster to our customers’ needs. Over
the past three years, we have been carrying out IT initiatives
to help us achieve this vision.
The first stage involved a technology refresh to improve
our service levels. Next, our focus shifted to operational
excellence: we consolidated our back office onto a single
ERP platform – SAP – and streamlined, re-engineered and automated
processes to reduce costs.
Now we are moving from a cost reduction to a revenue generation
phase with our CRM project, Customer Insight. This is concentrating
on better managing our customer and merchandising information
in order to achieve such goals as increasing customer loyalty,
optimising revenue and improving assortment planning.
As we move towards becoming a predictive BI-driven company,
we want greater flexibility in our IT infrastructure and better
support for our multi-channel environment. For example, we
want to be able to trigger, from the same systems, automated
marketing campaigns across different channels.
In order to do this, we need to provide the business with
a more robust IT architecture and a higher level of integration
between different sources of information.
The foundation for our IT strategy is a standards-based,
service oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure, which
will replace the expensive, proprietary and technically complex
point-to-point integration we had between systems in the past.
Our core business processes will be supported by the new
SOA infrastructure in Q3 2006, which will give Harrods both
greater business flexibility and the ability to add new applications
much more quickly.
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Conspectus 2006
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Copyright © 2006
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