Pioneering a truly global process for an established household name

About Stanley Black & Decker Technical Services

The Technical Services Division of Stanley Black and Decker are a geographically distributed unit responsible for maintaining the engineering Bill of Material (BOM) for service and repair agents.

Technical Engineers manage the product from launch, through revisions, to ‘end of life’ and ensure control of warehouse inventory and supply chain operations.

Stanley Black & Decker has around 60,000 employees in over 60 countries and operates the world's largest tools and storage business. The company's iconic brands include Black & Decker, Bostitch, CRAFTSMAN, DEWALT, FACOM, Irwin, Lenox, Porter Cable and Stanley.

Regionalised data on multiple legacy systems

The operational model for the Technical Services Division was complex and as the company had grown, it became increasingly inefficient and there was duplication of effort across regional teams.

 Engineers around the globe were maintaining regionalised datasets using legacy systems, in-house apps and spreadsheets: a common scenario in a longstanding global corporation.

This approach meant that no single unit had complete oversight of the entire process - or the impact on the bottom line. 

Adopt an agile approach to meet user requirements

We carried out a Blueprint Discovery phase which led to a number of workstreams, including:

• User research
• Business process re-engineering
• Definition of an architecture and technology stack which adhered to Stanley Black & Decker standards
• Delivery of system requirements (including user experience)
• Integration and interfaces to their websites and internal finance systems
• Data migration

PDMS recommended and implemented the project approach using an agile methodology and toolset.

This allowed us to eliminate risk early, collaborate with the product owners and iterate on feedback, thus ensuring a quality solution meeting user needs.

An effective result

• A single optimised global business process
• Delivery of a web-based system accessible to all users on any internet-enabled device
• Implementation of cloud-based hosting & modern web languages, delivering optimal performance in managing 8m+ records and 2.5m+ transactions  
• Delivery of detailed automated scripts to manage complex data migration 
• Improved security

Phase 2 of the project will deliver interfaces to SBD Services & Repair Websites and SAP.

I will always remember the times when I would discuss something we wanted with the PDMS Analyst, and she would listen and then there would be a pause; then she would say “well, why don’t we do it like X”.  And that would be my ‘ah ha’ moment.  She could always suggest something that would work better than what I had envisioned.

 

Debbie DePalmer, Former Technical Information Manager