Carte Blanche Group

My in-house team would have taken six months to get up to speed and implement this, but by picking up the programme from Core it’s been a lot quicker.

Brian Bennet IT Manager, Carte Blanche Group

Summary

Carte Blanche is a global greetings card company, distributing to more than 60 countries in 14 different languages. They launched in 1987 with a portfolio of 12 cards and have since become an international player in cards, gifts, toys, licensing and digital fields. Carte Blanche employs around 250 staff and works with major retail partners including Tesco, Asda and WHSmith.

Core worked with Carte Blanche to create a new licensing process based on SharePoint.

Challenge

As a result of Carte Blanche’s rapid development, the licensing department was struggling with a dated, ad-hoc workflow, with spreadsheets used to track licences and approvals and many processes handled by email and attachments. Carte Blanche wanted a more efficient solution.

Off-the-shelf applications were available to manage the standard licence approval process, but these required an upfront investment and annual licence, making them expensive to run in the long term. Bespoke amendments also incurred additional costs.

Carte Blanche was already familiar with SharePoint and saw potential to adopt it, particularly as it would incur some initial capital expenditure but minimal ongoing costs. They needed an experienced partner to perform the migration, and chose Core based on their approach, expertise and competitive price.

Solution

Core sat with the licensing team to discuss the approvals process and specify requirements for the application. With costs signed off and requirements confirmed, Core and its consultants developed the solution in just under two months, to schedule and on budget.

The new licensing and approval solution gave the team a more efficient workflow, with an easily-tracked procedure. The investment in SharePoint will pay for itself in under three years. the in-house IT team will handle ongoing admin and maintenance.

Why Core

Brian Benet, IT Manager, Carte Blanche Group

On using SharePoint: “We thought that, if SharePoint was about document approval and workflow, that’s more or less the basis of what a licensing approval process is trying to achieve. But out of the box, SharePoint couldn’t do what the licensing department needed. We realised we couldn’t do it ourselves and needed to engage with a SharePoint consultancy that really understood SharePoint and our own business.”

“We looked at several consultancies and that’s where we found Core. After some research we found that Core had the right approach and expertise, at a competitive price. They were able to go above and beyond some of the other providers and really listened to what we wanted to achieve from our SharePoint migration.

“We were communicated to on a regular basis so that all key stakeholders involved received daily updates. They got presentations of work in progress and opportunities to fine-tune, tweak or change things. It was very much working together. Issues were addressed before they became an issue.”

“My in-house team would have taken six months to get up to speed and implement this but by picking up the programme from Core it’s been a lot quicker. I didn’t get the feeling with Core that they delivered the programme and then just ran away. They were quite prepared in the UAT [User-Acceptance Testing] time-frame to run with it until people were happy and then hand the running of the system over to the in-house team. They really are into the long-term customer relationship.”