We have been partnered into the Middle East’s largest retail group for nearly 7 years. They split into 5 divisions;

1. Fashion and Apparel
2. A large fast fashion retailer
3. Health and Wellbeing
4. Food and Beverage
5. A large coffee brand

We started off by providing them with a contingency based permanent recruitment partnership, that enabled them to skill up for an upcoming large IT transformation programme. Through this we were able to give them enterprise architects, programme managers, head of departments (one for delivery and one for VMO) and many other people that had been on a similar transformation journey, with similar IT roadmaps at other retailers.

This transformation programme (roughly USD 350 million over 4 years) was RFP’d per domain area, with different technology winners in each space:

Stores — Oracle X-Stores and SIOCS
Merchandising — Oracle Retail
Supply Chain/OMS — IBM Sterling and Blueyonder WMS/TMS
CRM/Marketing — Comarch and Sprinklr
Finance — Oracle Fusion Financials
HR — Oracle Cloud HCM
Ecommerce — Magento
DW/BI — Oracle DW and Algonomy/Manthan (later changed to Azure/Power BI)

After an initial time period where our focus had been on permanent recruitment, we were asked to move to providing onsite contractors, to supplement the permanent workforce. This retailer was much clearer on what was being provided by partners and what was within their scope. We helped to supplement their PMO/VMO, project and programme management, testing, data, integration, change and business partnering/analyst teams.

The trust and partnership developed from this point forward. We became clear on exact needs, culture and ways of working. From here, we were able to propose another step change, that gave them access to a far wider pool of talent, offsite contracting!

This change took the contract team from 30-40 contractors to 200 over the course of a couple of years. The flexibility of contracting and notice periods allowed the programme to grow, and shrink, according to the roadmap of the transformation programme, without any of the complexities of permanent employment status.

We continue to partner with this retailer to the present day and are blessed to have shared this journey with them.