Multi-vendor IT estate. Integration that finally holds up to the pressures of retail.
Region: UK & Europe
Sector: Enterprise, Retail
Headcount: 300,000+
Revenue: £70bn
The situation
A retail giant runs one of the most complex IT estates in the UK. Stores, distribution centres, e-commerce, supply chain, payments, workplace IT. Each with their own vendors, their own tools, their own SLAs.
What they needed was a service chain that behaved as one operating model. What they had was a fragmented set of vendors held together by manual, bespoke integrations. And no one accountable for connecting them.
There was ambition to move to a cleaner SIAM (service integration and management) model, to power agility. But the integration layer couldn't support it.
The problem
The operating model had a structural fault. The technology was rarely the problem.
When a store-impacting incident hit, resolution speed depended on manual coordination, not on a process built to handle it. Tickets moved between service desks independently. Each provider updated their own system. No one had the full picture.
The team had accountability for outcomes they couldn't control.
The impacts were operational and organisational. SLAs were missed with no clear path to structural improvement. The service integrator couldn't track issues across suppliers, and their own internal experts ended up shadowing the process. The team was at capacity. But still more vendors, more incidents, no approved headcount. A change was needed.
The operating model wasn't failing because individual vendors were poor. It was failing because no one owned the connection between them.
The approach
ONEiO connected the full operating chain across the retailer's vendor ecosystem without replacing existing tooling or renegotiating contracts. Each provider kept their own platform. ONEiO made them work together cohesively.
Incidents began crossing vendor boundaries automatically, in real time, without manual intervention. End-to-end visibility was established across all parties - internal teams, prime service providers, and their subcontractors. All through one single operational view, in the team's existing ITSM tool.
The service chain started behaving as one operating model. What happened at the handoffs stopped being the team's problem to manage manually.
And the implementation was delivered as a fully managed service. So, no additional internal resource was required.
What changed
The outcome
Integration operations now run smoothly across a complex, multi-vendor retail IT estate. Continuity maintained. SIAM model functional. The team stopped chasing. They started leading. Complexity handled, without a rip-and-replace programme or specialist headcount.
