Retail Stores Collaboration Portal
Limited Brands is a national leader in women's fashion, lingerie, beauty, and personal care that operates more than 2,600 specialty stores across the United States and hundreds of additional locations worldwide. With six unique brands, including Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works, the Fortune 500 company focuses on creating a product and retail experience that leaves its customers feeling sexy, young, and beautiful. Earning more than $9 billion in sales during 2010, Limited Brands is currently driving expansion globally, focusing on creating and expanding emerging markets outside of North America.
Business Challenge
Already familiar with SharePoint 2007, Limited Brands approached Northridge seeking to develop an up-to-date, centralized collaboration portal built upon the SharePoint 2010 platform. With more than 3,000 retail centers around the globe, the company required a centralized enterprise communications platform capable of linking their entire network of retail centers to corporate headquarters. The SharePoint portal would serve as a two-way communications platform providing targeted bi-directional content distribution while reducing the inefficiency and long delays associated with printed materials. In addition, the portal would provide easy access to corporate documentation according to employee role, enabling collaboration, driving effective communication, and maximizing the ease of information distribution across the entire corporate network.
Solution Approach
Northridge leveraged an on-site Explore session with Limited Brands to determine the business requirements of the SharePoint solution and outline a six week define, build, deploy program for the portal. Northridge recommended a staged deployment strategy and designed a pilot program that met the client’s timeframe and provided a working solution that would encourage adoption and effectively reduce the overhead required for development and deployment.
To reduce the overall complexity of the enterprise solution, a pilot group of retail centers around the world received the Phase One deployment of the SharePoint portal. Northridge built brand-specific portals for each division of Limited Brands, leveraging the talents of the Northridge SharePoint User Experience team to create attractive digital experiences for each of the brands. An attractive SharePoint user experience encouraged adoption of the SharePoint portal solution and effectively improved the style, appearance, and performance of the portal.
Within the new SharePoint portal, Limited Brands leverages the collaborative features of the SharePoint platform to distribute product information, floor sets, eLearning content, brand guide documentation, and digital media to its retail centers. The migration to digital content significantly reduces the volume and costs of printed and shipped brand materials. Limited Brands can communicate with its retail centers quickly and more frequently while avoiding the costs of traditional materials handling and promoting a smaller carbon footprint.
Users and employees are provided with up-to-date news and content from headquarters via a corporate blog accessible from all of the brand portals. Corporate information can be disseminated according to a user’s role and privileges, allowing for targeted content pushes aimed at specific employee groups within the corporation. Furthermore, the hierarchical structure of the SharePoint solution enables content distribution according to location and brand, allowing Limited Brands to push content to individual stores, regional networks, or an entire brand name.
Finally, employee feedback and communication is encouraged through a mix of out-of-the-box and custom SharePoint functionality, including new messaging, wiki, discussion board, and “Sticky Note” systems. These systems replace a rudimentary communication system with functional, innovative solutions. Developed by Northridge, the new Sticky Note system allows managers to post messages and status updates directly to the portal. Designed to encourage a shift from easily misplaced physical notes, Sticky Notes provides managers with a hub to centralize important information for their stores.
Results Delivered
The pilot program allowed Limited Brands to push the solution to market quickly. Already, user behavior and performance feedback allows Northridge to enhance and extend the SharePoint portal as the deployment reaches the remaining retail centers.
With a target goal of Spring 2012 for complete deployment across all retail centers worldwide, Northridge continues to work on-site with Limited Brands to provide support, assist with portal management, and ensure a smooth transition to the new SharePoint solution. Northridge and Limited Brands are also currently planning a formal SharePoint Solution Lifecycle Management Process to provide advisement and support of the retail giant's new portal platform.