Lombok

The Company

Furniture retailer Lombok opened their first shop on the Kings Road in 2000, offering an original collection of handmade, affordable wooden furniture from the Far East. They have expanded across the UK and are now a leading brand in their sector.

The IT challenge

Conosco have supported Lombok from 2002 when they had one shop and eight employees, through to their current 18 stores and over 150 employees. The challenge has been to keep their IT systems adapted to their changing needs, anticipating future requirements without incurring unnecessary costs.

During a period of rapid expansion, Lombok opened multiple stores each year. Shop fit-outs are tightly-scheduled projects, with only a few weeks' prior warning and just one or two days to install the IT. Cost control is critical to ensure the business's expansion funds are used as efficiently as possible.

In parallel, the company's growing size brought not just greater scale but more complex requirements, such as a real-time point-of-sale system integrated across all shops and support for evening and weekend trading.

The Conosco solution

The success of our partnership with Lombok is based on a very close working relationship: we attend management meetings as the IT department and create the IT component of their annual financial budget. With access to their expansion plans we can set a technology roadmap that shows, for example, when they will need to add additional servers to cope with new staff. As a result, we've been able to manage their rapid growth in a smooth and planned way.

To meet their requirements for integrating a chain of shops, a head office and a warehouse, we set them up at an early stage with load-balanced Terminal Servers. These servers let users connect from any computer anywhere to their virtual Windows desktop; once there, they have access to all the programs and documents they need, and can work collaboratively on them with others. To underpin this critical network, we installed secondary internet connections at the shops which switch in automatically if the primary connection fails.

Dealing with the rapid shop roll-out required planning, coordination and teamwork. We dealt with the short lead time on a new shop by creating a shop IT template with pre-agreed costs and specifications. This allowed us to order equipment and internet connections without delay. It also gave their project managers a tested component for their project planning with known dependencies and milestones. The result has been shops opening on time and IT delivered at the agreed budget.

The client's experience

'Conosco have been at our side all the way - they've kept us on track, anticipated our growing needs and responded as partners rather than suppliers. They've been an essential part of a successful team in delivering the growth of Lombok.'

Alex Creswell-Turner
Founder & CEO, Lombok

www.lombok.co.uk