Background

Apparel Group is a clothing and accessories company that designs, produces and manages brands in Australia such as Sportscraft, SABA and Willow with strong manufacturing relationships in China. The company also has a private label division for many other leading Australian retailers.

Business Challenge

The CEO saw an opportunity to review the current IT structure, roles and processes to determine the most effective way forward over the next 12 – 18 months. This presented the organisation with the opportunity to:

  • Understand the capacity and capability of the IT resources that were in place, to enable future planning and alignment with the organisation’s goals.
  • Confirm that the IT team (staff and contract resources) was structured correctly.
  • Provide visibility of the workload and progress of the IT team in terms of projects and daily operations with the view to simplifying the processes.
  • Identify potential areas of savings due to inappropriate or overly complex processes.
  • Identify any major risks or vulnerabilities within the IT function that may impact the delivery of IT support for the business (personnel, current projects etc).
  • Identify any gaps that exist in the alignment of the business strategies and how the IT team and IT systems support the business.

Results

CMC was engaged to conduct an independent IT Assessment to determine the most effective IT structure and the roles and resources that needed to be in place to effectively support the business moving forward.

Areas included in the assessment were:

  • IT Strategy and Alignment.
  • IT Team Structure.
  • Infrastructure.
  • IT Support.
  • PMO and Project Governance.
  • Vendor Management.
  • Applications and Reporting.

An IT Assessment Report was produced which included key findings and a detailed action plan which Apparel Group then implemented.