DEICHMANN

How a 100-year-old global footwear retailer’s IT team changed its world

ONE COMPLETE OVERVIEW

INCREASED EFFICIENCY

EASY & FAST IMPLEMENTATION

“The overall positive impact Xurrent has made is enormous; our team members around the world now have a unified experience. It makes the business easier to manage, leadership has greater visibility of system and service performance, and employees are happier. Nearly every week, we get requests from other departments and teams asking to use Xurrent, which we can easily accommodate, as it is very simple to extend across the organization.”

Oliver Kantner, Project Manager at Deichmann

Deichmann SE was founded in the early 1900s as a shoemaker’s shop. A century later, Deichmann™ has nearly 5,000 storefronts and almost 50,000 employees globally. The massive operation includes 40 e-commerce sites as part of its omni-channel approach. Deichmann™ also owns hot fashion footwear retailer Snipe and sports and athleisure company Ochsner Sport.

Creating a more efficient IT function

A disparate IT function.

An overabundance of IT teams.

A variety of technologies deployed to deliver its global business.  

This was the result of decades of business in various countries across the globe.

Deichmann was well overdue for an IT transformation.

Committed to modernizing how it delivered IT services, Deichmann™ was itching to migrate from “disparate, complex, and highly customized” to “unified and standardized.” 

The goal: create a more efficient IT function while improving employee experience. 

“You can’t deliver great experiences to customers in the fashion business unless your employees are best ready to represent the brand each and every day,” said Severin Canisius, Deichmann™ CIO. “So we’ve made significant global investments to unify our IT delivery capabilities, which ultimately leads to more consistent customer and employee experiences. Technology really becomes an enabler for the business.”

The IT modernization process began.

What Deichmann was looking for in a partner

Deichmann’s various IT departments used home-grown IT Service Management (ITSM) and service desk solutions — many with separate portals and support methods.

The complexity and lack of consistent service delivery visibility were increasingly difficult to manage. Each country operated under a different set of norms. Even within a country, processes were not always the same. 

It was time for a change.

However, deciding on a new vendor was not simple; it required a cultural and mindset shift.

Deichmann wanted a vendor partner to standardize its IT service catalog across the business. Why? Standardization >> consistency >> higher employee (and ultimately customer) satisfaction. So they hoped. 

The vetting process looked at both features and functionality as well as fit. They needed a solution that was easy to deploy and took a standards-based approach.

The team asked several vendors for a proof of concept based on a long list of requirements — “must-haves” and “nice-to-haves.”.

They found what they were looking for … in Xurrent.

Deichmann considered a long list of vendors before choosing Xurrent as its partner.

Project Manager Oliver Kantner shared this: “We looked at what I call ‘cool candy’ service tools, which appear nice and simple at first sight but, when you take another look, disappoint.” 

Other competitors also required a lot of extra modules. Oliver compared it to buying a phone, TV, or car. “Often, you pay a base price, and then it turns out you need various expensive extras for it to work properly.”

Xurrent stood out as the clear choice, the obvious leader. 

It only took 1 week, according to Oliver, until “everyone preferred Xurrent.”

Why?

Oliver shared that Xurrent was unique because we were the only vendor that met Deichmann’s long list of requirements. 

>> Xurrent supports its global IT footprint with a modern platform that was quick to deploy across thousands of locations.

>> Xurrent’s SaaS architecture enables teams across geographies and languages to implement quickly with state-of-the-art and out-of-the-box functionality. 

Xurrent completed the implementation in three months. 

Integrations with other vendors, Atlassian and FreshService? Check.

Single Sign-On (SSO)? Check. 

An e-commerce store. Check.

A unified IT service catalogue offering services, service requests, workflows, and knowledge articles? Check.

All ITIL practices – from request fulfillment to CMDB to even project management? Check.

A few other bonuses: 

• Access to an employee portal from Day 1. 
• Tied in SAP instance and HR systems for more robust employee experiences.
• Added the Information Security Management System (ISMS). 

And this all lead to happier employees.

Happier employees >> happier customers

“The overall positive impact Xurrent has made is enormous; our team members around the world now have a unified experience. It makes the business easier to manage, leadership has greater visibility of system and service performance, and employees are happier. Nearly every week, we get requests from other departments and teams asking to use Xurrent, which we can easily accommodate, as it is very simple to extend across the organization.” – Oliver Kantner

Xurrent proved so effective that other significant parts of the enterprise rapidly adopted it. 

Today’s Xurrent usage covers more than just Deichmann’s IT team. HR + Retail Architecture and Design + Facility Management + Purchasing — all have implemented Xurrrent, making it a true Enterprise Service Management (ESM) system. 

And that’s just internally at Deichmann.

Deichmann customer feedback has been impressive with a whopping 93% of end users sharing they are happy. “This is great to see for our IT team,” said Oliver. “We never had this before [Xurrent].”

Other key wins

Happy employees, happy end users, and more departments using the platform — all huge wins. 

But that’s not all. Here are a few more:

• No more dependence on external consultants. The team is now empowered to do more themselves.
• Language barriers removed. Real time, auto translation in over 80 languages means each user sees the platform rendered in its home language. 
• Significant increase in global  IT productivity and efficiency. A single, easy-to-use self-service portal means many tasks and cross-functional workflows are now automated. 

• Improved IT performance and service delivery. End-to-end transparency and real-time reporting grants management the visibility they need to monitor SLAs and service quality. They can identify and resolve issues much faster. For the first time, they can be certain that IT services are being delivered consistently and successfully. 
• More accurate, reliable forecasting. Ability to forecast based on the data, tickets, and service performance of the previous month.
• A unified IT service delivery. One system. One IT. Cross-company collaboration is now seamless, with one easy-to-use service management platform for all.

“Knowing and having had experience with other systems, I would certainly recommend Xurrent to other companies. I like how in Xurrent it is very clear who is responsible for a service. That means the service organization functions well.” —Oliver Kantner

We look forward to growing with Deichmann over the next century. Let’s add some more wins.

Implementation

The implementation was executed in close collaboration with Xurrrent and its local partner, Techwork. The plan was to do this in three months for the base version, and everything went according to plan, but after a while, DEICHMANN asked to extend this period by one month to extend the scope and include more from the start. 

Training

Techwork explained how to create workflows, and Michael Wilken from Xurrrent explained all the possibilities of Xurrrent, including CIs and Project Management.

Scope

• Request Fulfillment
• Incident Management
• Configuration & Asset Management
• Service Level Management
• Project Management
• Automation Rules 
• Change Management (Planned)
• Release Management (Planned)

Integrations

• SSO, AD, and additional personal data, assets for the shops (more than 100,000 assets)
• ERP (Under discussion and may follow.)
• Freshdesk from the Point of Sale vendor
• Jira Software Development
• Multiple tools for inventory and system event matching