Richard Surman, Head of IT for Crew Clothing tells us about his experience with Clekt and the Enterprise Data Hub.
Richard Surman, Head of IT at Crew Clothing
Crew Clothing was founded back in the early 1990s by Alistair Parker-Swift. He founded it from a little windsurfing shop in Salcombe. He is a former British skier and had an idea of a concept brand with heritage sailing wear and rugby shirts. Since then, Crew Clothing has grown from strength to strength, with 100 stores selling in multiple concessions as well as franchise partners.
Why did you decide to work with Clekt and the Enterprise Data Hub?
We decided to work with Clekt to deliver quick and intelligent solutions to the business to help accelerate our IT strategy, deliver best of breed solutions for the business and to help enable our growth over the coming years. The speed at which Clekt have been able to scope and deliver key initiatives to the business has been paramount to our decision for selecting Clekt. They’ve enabled us to deliver a lot of solutions quickly and efficiently.
How has the Enterprise Data Hub supported you in delivering key business initiatives?
The Enterprise Data Hub has allowed us to connect our systems in ways that we couldn’t do previously. It’s given us the capability to analyse our customer data a lot more intrinsically. The Enterprise Data hub has enabled us to scope and deliver solutions a lot faster and analyse our customer data more effectively. One of the biggest challenges from an IT directors’ perspective has been how we quickly and effectively deliver new solutions and data for the business. The Clekt solution helped us to deliver that quickly and effectively with minimal interaction from myself and my team.
What alternative options did you consider?
There were several alternative options that we considered on the market, but based on experience at other organisations these have proven to be expensive and time consuming. From a development perspective the Clekt solution gave us the opportunity to deliver a quick and effective solution to help accelerate our IT strategy both as a cost-effective approach and quickly.
Where do you see the future value for businesses who optimise their data?
The solution that Clekt provide is critical to our IT strategy. Moving forward as a business it provides us with the overarching layer to integrate all our new and future systems to work cohesively with one another and deliver the right data to the right solution.
What benefits have you realised so far as a business?
The benefits that we’ve seen as a business has been around the speed at which Clekt have managed to turn around our requirements rapidly and effectively. Also, their ability to support the solution based on our ever-changing needs from a retail perspective, it’s critical to us as a business moving forward that we have that capability to be fluid and react as the business needs us to.
How will the Enterprise Data Hub support your strategy moving forward?
The necessity for us at Crew is to ensure that we can deliver the right data to the right people within the business ensuring that they can make key strategic decisions and deliver the right briefs to market for us as a brand. We started to use the Enterprise Data Hub as an operational framework to deliver data between our systems. Whilst that is delivered, there are also a lot of great initiatives, and the future looks very positive from an analytical perspective. We will work with Clekt to deliver a lot of future solutions from a data perspective. We’re looking to leverage the analytical piece from the Enterprise Data Hub to help us deliver a lot of our future initiatives.
