Russell & Bromley Case Study

The client.

Russell & Bromley has remained synonymous with expert craftsmanship and

fashion-led design since 1880. Specialising in luxury shoes and handbags for men

and women, the brand continues to be the definitive choice for the well-dressed.

The goal.

We were embarking on a major transformation project to modernise how the

business operated and how we communicated with one another.

This change programme would see us change the POS, the back end infrastructure, client devices, CRM/ERP, Internet, Intranet, Comms processes and a lot more. With a small team, we needed a specialist partner that we could trust to support and advise us on the best approach to the challenges and goals ahead.

Infrastructure challenges.

The existing infrastructure was ageing and needed to be updated to accommodate new applications.

Accepting that a refresh was required, there was also a requirement to move to a

more flexible way of working. Historically all stores had been reliant on connecting to Head Office to access resources, so any issues with connectivity back to HQ

presented a problem for us. We wanted to remove the reliance on the Bromley HQ

so the stores operated more independently.

As well as needing guidance on the right infrastructure platform, we also accepted that once it was in place, we needed a specialist to run it on our behalf.

Why did they engage Foundation IT?

“We wanted an infrastructure partner that we could work closely with, to help guide us through the process of selecting the right technology platforms, implementing them and taking full responsibility once it was in place to allow us to focus on making changes to the business systems.

We have known Foundation IT for a number of years and they had been providing us with ad-hoc infrastructure services which had demonstrated their capability in

infrastructure and they have always been responsive and flexible.

FIT had good ideas about how public cloud could be leveraged to remove reliance away from HQ and how that could be grown as legacy systems are replaced by new systems.

Last but not least, we got on with the people involved in our project. We have honest conversations and have some fun in the process.”

The solution.

“FIT refreshed our on-premises infrastructure, splitting it across our Data Centre at

HQ and a dedicated external Data Centre for resilience.

hey helped to build our Azure & O365 Tenant and moved viable services over to that platform, this enabled us to slim down our on-premises infrastructure and move to a more flexible platform that gave us the right infrastructure foundation.

FIT help us to ensure that our Azure and on-premise infrastructure is well

maintained, optimised and available; which in turn allows us to focus on the services that run on these platforms such as our POS, D365, Power Apps etc."