House of Fraser Reduces Its Carbon Footprint With Integrated Communications

Founded in 1849, House of Fraser is considered as one of the best-known retailers in the shopping malls and high streets of the United Kingdom (U.K.). The company manages 61 stores including its flagship branch in London's Oxford Street. To manage these stores, the company employs almost over 6,500 direct employees and 10,000 concession staff. This growth in it's size called for a better way of communication to save time and money spent in traditional ways of communication. The company felt the need to improve its operating efficiency and competitiveness by deploying technology that would help with integrated communications, presence awareness, and video conferencing. House of Fraser finally decided upon Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 on advice of a specialist video conferencing vendor. Also, Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 appeared to be an easy to deploy and use application that offered value for money. The company was satisfied with the performance after a successful pilot program. This was followed by deployment of the application throughout the business. This decision helped the company in greatly improving their communication and in gaining speed in organizing product launches, training, and e-learning. The staff now makes use of video conferencing tools to reconcile month-end accounts without leaving the store. This also helped the company in vastly reducing its carbon footprint! All this resulted in faster decision-making and problem resolution.