Turkey's leading shoe manufacturing and retail sales company, FLO, started to offer faster and higher quality support services to all its stakeholders with SMAX, the new service desk solution of Micro Focus, which was implemented together with Basistek. The adventure of FLO, which started in a shoe workshop in 1960, has turned into a success story that sells 1 out of every 4 shoes in Turkey today. While FLO takes firm steps forward with its stores, e-commerce site and new brands it has incorporated, it does not ignore technology investments in this journey. Continuing to work with Basistek on the newly reconstructed service desk, FLO offers all kinds of support services through the new service desk to both the company headquarters, domestic stores and overseas stores. Noting that Basistek offers the most accurate value proposition to meet today's IT needs, FLO Network and Security Manager Serkan CandeÄŸir answered our questions:
Could you give brief information about FLO?
The foundations of FLO Mağazacılık were laid in 1960 in Ahmet Ziylan's shoe workshop. While it continued with sole and shoe production under the name of Ziylan Group in 1971, production started under the brand name of Kinetix in 1989. In 2001, with the opening of the first FLO store, a step was taken into the retail sector. In the following years, the continued growth with the acquisition of the import and production rights of Dockers, the purchase of the Lumberjack brand, and the opening of Polaris and Instreet stores were followed by the opening of overseas stores in 2014. We are the leader in our field with our 9,500 employees and 470 stores in Turkey. We operate in a total of 16 countries with our 82 overseas stores and franchise operations.
How was the decision to invest in the new service desk, and with what institutional needs and requirements?
Our current service desk tool was an in-house developed platform that has been successfully serving IT and FLO end users for many years, in line with the best practices of traditional solutions at the time it was developed. Therefore, there were times when our current platform was insufficient to meet today's IT processes and needs, "IT for IT" and "IT for Business" demands. In addition, we began to encounter some challenges brought by growth. Since the system could not fully meet our requirements, we had to follow some applications manually. Follow-up via e-mails was a waste of time and required extra effort. Another issue caused by our old system was that we were not able to measure and determine the effect of this on our customer relations. In addition to these, issues such as our geographical expansion, the increase in the number of stores, and the activation of international operations pushed us to seek a more effective solution. We can list our other prominent investment triggers as follows.
Implementing ITIL requirements
To meet the needs of adaptation to current technologies and multiple integrations To increase the satisfaction of our customers by measuring ourselves better and to reach our goals of continuous service development.
What were your criteria for choosing Basistek for this investment? Which investment products and solutions are positioned at FLO?
We have signed successful projects with Basistek in the past. One of these projects is Micro Focus help desk solution (SMAX Service Management Application). During our cooperation from the past, Basistek has always been a business partner that guides us in the most correct way with its knowledge, and with its professional project management approach, it has made a significant contribution to providing the most optimum solution with minimum cost. For this reason, we thought that working with Basistek for this investment was the right choice. In addition, the Micro Focus SMAX application that we have been waiting for a while has been released and the idea of ​​being the first company in Turkey to apply it excited us.
When did you start this investment? When was the project completed?
Our first meetings started in April 2018, and our analysis studies started in June. In December, we went live. Thus, the first phase of the project was completed within the planned deadline. We divided the project into phases for the realization of all ITIL processes. In the first phase of the project; Service Desk Module (Service Desk), Incident Management, Request Fulfillment, Service Catalogue, Configuration Management (CMDB), Knowledge Base Module (KBDB), SLA / OLA Management, IT Contract Management, IT Supplier Management We implemented the processes. In the second phase, we started working to implement the Problem and Change Management processes. We anticipate that the second phase will be completed without any problems and within the planned time.
What benefits has this investment brought to FLO?
With the implementation of ITIL service operations, it has become possible to make services measurable. We have had more efficient processes with effective SLA and OLA monitoring, and this has resulted in significant time and cost savings for us. We started to support our users more efficiently. By determining the degree of importance of the problems with simple questions, we became more effective in the use of resources. In this way, we started to use IT personnel for more value-added works, and at the same time, call and support phones were reduced. Our users had the opportunity to manage service desk issues in a single tool. In addition to all these, increasing user satisfaction has further strengthened the relationship we have established with our customers.
How do you evaluate the cooperation of FLO and Basistek teams in this investment?
Basistek has once again left positive impressions on us with its professional, competent and guiding approach. As Basistek and FLO teams, we enjoyed exploring, creating and realizing together. Most importantly, it was the confidence of knowing that we have a real partner experienced in this field.