This white paper is based on the case study of Dunelm which is a UK-based home furnishing retailer. The company has most of its operations in the UK and has its headquarters in Syston, England. It is one of the largest homeware retailers in the UK and is having a technical team of 300 employees (Dunelm Case study, 2022). The team is seriously engaged to adopt the most advanced technological developments so that they will be able to develop their strategies and practices. The company is going to collaborate with the AWS services and migrate from SAP Enterprise Resource Planning System to AWS. There were various issues the company was facing such as low productivity, lesser data storage, issues in the management of front-end systems, lack of innovations, and increasing the cost of operations (Dunelm Case study, 2022). This white paper is going to discuss the background and issues of Dunelm for obtaining and migrating to AWS. The leadership practices that are used in the successful adoption of the teams are also analysed and, in the end, effective recommendations are also provided that will help the organization to gain a better outcome.
Dunelm is one of the largest home furnishing retailers in the UK that was serving clients online and in the stores. The company was having issues with its website as the customer traffic was limited to the previous SAP ERP systems. The issue was not limited to the website but also limited access of the customer resulting in less profitability. The storage capacity of the cloud systems is also limited which is now allowing to use of innovative ideas in the organization (Dunelm Case study, 2022). The speed of fetching and retrieving the data was also not up to the mark which created several issues and also impacted the productivity and performance of the organizations. Before moving to the SAP ERP system, Dunelm
acquired WorldStores in 2016 and the IT system of Dunelm and WorldStores have worked together to develop opportunities in the technology. The was facing several issues with the current database storage facility in which SAP system was not performing up to the mark and thus has reduced in the low productivity. The computer system of the company was less scalable, with major on-premise availability issues of hosts, struggling with the storage capacity (Dunelm Case study, 2022). In handling its data centres, the company was also spending much and gaining less advantage over its rivals. The innovations were hampered and they have to put their resources into managing the older IT systems.
The current issues that were running in Dunelm had forced the leadership and management of the company to think and upgrade the IT systems. The widespread of Covid-19 has emerged and the company had shut down its offline stores. The need of developing a new and effective IT system had emerged and the management had decided to go with the new system of AWS (Amazon Web Services). The leadership of the organization was looking to increase the customer experience and timing at the website by specifying the click and collect services, allowing the customers to have one hour block of time that was 3 hours in the previous slots (Dunelm Case study, 2022). This showed that the strategies of the leaders and the management were quite effective and they were looking to grab the opportunities of shutting the offline stores. The efforts of the company leaders were effective and this resulted in the following manner:
There are various leadership practices that an effective leader must apply to their organization. The leaders of Dunelm have used leadership practices that have helped them in the development of the organization in several terms which are as follows:
Mentorship: The organization having good working culture creates space for its employees. The leaders provide opportunities for growth and development with the help of training and support. In the case of Dunelm, the leaders have found that the employees were working to their limits and not able to expand their interests and values that will be beneficial for them. For doing this, they have bought an advanced IT system with the collaboration of AWS that has helped the employees to learn the advanced technology. This opportunity was only effective when the company provides training and developmental sessions for the needs and wants of the employees (Alayoubi et al., 2020). The training and growth opportunity for the organization has allowed them to adapt to the new migration within just 6 months.
Articulated gaols: An effective leader must have long-term goals that have been viewed publicly (Lochmiller & Cunningham, 2019). The public interest in the goals allows the leader and employee to work passionately to achieve them. The entire team must also be familiar with the current target and role of each team member to achieve that particular goal. In the case of Dunelm, the leaders of the company have an articulated goal that has allowed the employees of the 300 technical team to work and achieve the desired target. They have managed the work with each other and completed the task of migration in SAP ERP within just 6 months. This shows that the leadership practices run in Dunelm were goal specific and every member was aware of his role.
Leading Innovation: Innovation is one of the important aspects that can boost the morale of the employees within the organization (Labrague et al., 2020). The leadership of Dunelm was feeling that the employees were not innovative enough to work on the new adaptive technologies. They were demotivating themselves as they needed to be more productive and wanted increased learning. The previous technology was forcing them to work on the slow process. The new technological advancement of the organization has helped the employees to work faster and in an effective way so that they can think innovative.
Leading Change: Change is the only constant to makes an organization sustaining among its rivals. The same case happened with Dunelm. The company has started to implement the change to migrate its existing ERP system with the AWS and for doing that the leaders of the company had communicated with its employees. This communication had helped them to be ready for the upcoming changes such as user interface, training, growth, motivation, etc. Therefore, the leadership of the organization had used collaborative and successful leadership practices for organizational growth (Toledo et al., 2018).
The actions and activities of the leadership within Dunelm are exceptional and they have resulted in a good result. Although, the organizational leaders are doing their best to increase profitability but also, they have to be focused on the development of their employees, vision, sustainability, and competitive advantage (Lopez et al., 2018).
The leader of Dunelm must adhere to the needs and demands of the employees. This might include the opportunity development, training, and developmental sessions, providing incentives and allowing growth for the upcoming future. These actions will help the organization to increase trust among the employees so that they will feel secure and safe about their future with the company. These actions will also increase productivity and performance not only for the employees but also for the organization.
The leaders of Dunelm must focus on the long-term vision for the organization rather than gaining immediate profits. The long-term benefits might include an independent cloud-based database that will help the company to operate on its own without the interference of a third party. The short-term vision of managing the cloud-based database is not adequate for the sustainability of the organization in the competitive market. Additionally, the extra cost of operations might also impact the overall profitability of the firm.
Sustainability is referred to as the static position of an organization within the same industry. The main aim of a sustainable organization is to work within the industry by giving competition to its rivals. To gain sustainability, the leaders of Dunelm must focus on the unique products and services offered to its customers at affordable prices. They must increase their reach towards the customers with the help of online selling. The innovative techniques will help the company in manufacturing unique products that will be made as per the needs and demands of the organization (Hu et al., 2022). Therefore, leaders must also think of a sustainability perspective.
The last but not the least recommendation is that the leaders must also be competitive in the market. The competitiveness positions a company and its products and provides a unique selling proposition among the customers. Since Dunelm is a tech-oriented organization;
therefore, it must focus on gaining a competitive advantage with the help of innovation. The forecasting and supply chain must be as per the requirement of the market (Buli?ska-Stangrecka & Bagie?ska, 2019). By fulfilling these requirements, the leaders will be able to direct the distributors and the manufacturers for selling the demanded products. This will decrease the dead goods in the inventory thus increasing profitability.
Conclusion
In this white paper, it can be concluded that Dunelm was looking to adapt to the latest technology of increasing the productivity and performance of its employees. They also wanted to increase the customer experience with the help of decreasing the fetching and retrieval time of the database from the cloud storage. For doing this they have migrated the SAP with AWS just within 6 months with the help of the expertise of ProServe team. With the help of this migration, they will be able to increase their overall performance by 30%. The system of the organization runs 30% faster. They will also be able to manage the rising online demand of customers due to Covid-19. This migration has created an opportunity for the organization to be sustainable among its rivals. All of this had happened with the bright and long-term vision of the leaders of Dunelm. They have focused to sustain the business of the company with the help of innovative ideas to increase organizational performance. In addition to that, the management of Dunelm must also focus on some areas. They must provide an effective working culture for the employees that will help them in gaining trust and innovative ideas.
References
Alayoubi, M. M., Al Shobaki, M. J., & Abu-Naser, S. S. (2020). Strategic leadership practices and their relationship to improving the quality of educational service in Palestinian Universities. International Journal of Business Marketing and Management (IJBMM), 5(3), 11-26.
Buli?ska-Stangrecka, H., & Bagie?ska, A. (2019). HR practices for supporting interpersonal trust and its consequences for team collaboration and innovation. Sustainability, 11(16), 4423.
Dunelm Case study. 2022. [Online]. Available through: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/dunelm-case-study/?did=cr_card&trk=cr_card.
Hu, X. E., Hinds, R., Valentine, M. A., & Bernstein, M. S. (2022). A” Distance Matters” Paradox: Facilitating Intra-Team Collaboration Can Harm Inter-Team Collaboration. arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.02484.
Labrague, L. J., Nwafor, C. E., & Tsaras, K. (2020). Influence of toxic and transformational leadership practices on nurses’ job satisfaction, job stress, absenteeism and turnover intention: A cross?sectional study. Journal of Nursing Management, 28(5), 1104-1113.
Lochmiller, C. R., & Cunningham, K. M. (2019). Leading learning in content areas: A systematic review of leadership practices used in mathematics and science instruction. International Journal of Educational Management.
Lopez Hernandez, A. K., Fernandez-Mesa, A., & Edwards-Schachter, M. (2018). Team collaboration capabilities as a factor in startup success. Journal of technology management & innovation, 13(4), 13-23.
Neerincx, M. A., van Diggelen, J., & Stolk, M. L. Design Patterns and Ontologies for Situated Human-Agent Collaboration at Organization, Team and Interaction Level.
Toledo, J. C., Gonzalez, R. V. D., Lizarelli, F. L., & Pelegrino, R. A. (2018). Lean production system development through leadership practices. Management Decision.
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