Leading retailer Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) needed to embrace rapidly changing consumer buying habits. Crucial to their success was revamping their Wi-Fi network in 350 stores across North America. Yet due to a lack of capital and staff resources, the project was due to be deployed over several years. They needed this project done NOW. 

SOLUTION

The internal staff was overextended and did not have the capacity to design the project, engineer the solutions, or run the projects on their own. BAZ stepped in, serving as the internal project lead, and coordinated teams from five different deployment partners. They significantly reduced the load on HBC engineers and IT leadership, and consistently applied proven best practices as we installed 20,000 new access points throughout their stores.

Internal functions BAZ led included:

• Coordinated optimal placement for new APs with 3rd party engineers 
• Designed the roll out approach, wrote RFPs, ran the selection process and finalized all third-party contracts for equipment and deployment services
• Collaborated with HBC engineers to draft the detailed technical roll out procedures and working documents for deployment partners
• Managed all third-party billing throughout all phases
• From phase to phase, we refined operating procedures to increase efficiency

OUTCOME and ROI

• Reduced capital costs by 10% via smart sourcing throughout the project 
• Generated over $500,000 in savings via invoice validation and inventory management 
• Recovered 100’s of access points that had been believed to be lost by identifying gaps in a vendor’s asset tracking system
• Shaved 6 weeks off project delivery time by adjusting operating pace as HBC’s business needs changed

Our ability to take on broad accountability for the project outcomes while staying tuned into HBCs evolving business needs allowed us to remove a significant burden of running the project from HBC’s IT staff.  “BAZ was truly amazing,” said Network Director Charlie Shields.  “they understood our business objectives and designed and executed a multi-year, multi- phase project to get us the results we needed within our corporate constraints.”