Case study: Argos

Argos is a UK based multi-channel retailer and part of Sainsbury’s group. Sainsbury’s Argos manages over 2200 stores across the UK and is one the largest General Merchandise and Clothing businesses in the UK.

Sainsbury’s Argos decided to implement SoftwareCentral to manage and optimise its IT infrastructure, since then they have been slowly increasing the functionality of SoftwareCentral and work closely together with SoftwareCentral to reach further improvements.

“We have been working with SoftwareCentral for about a year now and have been slowly increasing the functionality of the product as well as working closely with SoftwareCentral to develop the product in line with customer needs. Argos use the product in a limited format but it gives us incredible value in the way we use the product.” says Danny Begg, SAM Technical Specialist at Argos.

By changing the authorisation process of software deployments Argos could increase the productivity of its employees. They moved the authorisation away from managers to a dedicated SAM team, who can manage software requests in a faster and more efficient way.

“We have used the product to provide software to our 50,000 colleagues within a 5 minute time window by centralising the authorisation process away from managers to a dedicated SAM team who then allocate licenses based upon the groups use of the software, purchasing to fill the gaps as required or removing the software after the request if required. This allows people to be instantly productive on behalf of the company.”

Furthermore, SoftwareCentral enables Argos to manage and allocate local administrative rights on a temporary base to clients, improving clients’ productivity and internal security.

“We have also used SoftwareCentral to provision and deploy local administrative rights for a limited period of time to colleagues machines, this allows them to update their cloud applications such as Adobe without having to log tickets each time, and used in conjunction with logging allows us to monitor our internal security and reduce the amount of administrative rights within the organisation.”

Last but not least, Argos was able to cut costs for software licenses and 3rd party service providers, by optimizing and enhancing their SCCM system and speeding up processes.

“Lastly by enhancing the power of SCCM the delivery and removal of software is speeded up reducing license costs, IMAC’s and costs to 3rd party managed service providers.”