Travis Perkins, the building and construction company, started its cloud journey in 2013. It all began with a five-year roadmap that included a big adoption of technology to improve the efficiency of its operations. In fact, the management saw technology as an enabler of change and wanted to use it to stay ahead of competition.

Four years later, everything seems to be working as per plan for Travis Perkins as efficiency and productivity have soared. The company’s self service portal supports about 30,000 staff who find these IT tools productive and less time-consuming. Undoubtedly, this company’s IT budget has doubled over the last four years to keep pace with the benefits that come from it.

So, what exactly has changed in this company?

First and probably the most important is a change in the mindset. The company’s culture has moved from one where technology was seen as a disruptor to an active adoption of the same and even making it an integral part of everyday operations. Employees were given training on how to handle the new internal systems and this has worked wonders for the company in terms of what its employees can achieve in the same given time.

The second change is to move from an environment where fast fixing a problem was the norm to an environment where the possibility of a problem was reduced. In other words, Travis Perkins moved from a “fixing” approach to a preventing one, and this has helped the company to save a considerable amount of time and money.

With technologies like cloud, it was in a better position to predict a problem even before it occurred and could fix it right away. As a result, there was no disruption or loss to its operations. This was way better than addressing a problem and finding a solution after it occurred.

Thirdly, adoption of technologies like cloud helped this company to move away from legacy systems. Now, its new systems are more unified and presents many advantages such as flexibility and speed – things that were impossible to achieve earlier. It’s also helped the company to achieve greater levels of integration among all its operations.

This is a remarkable improvement considering that Travis Perkins is a company that operates in the traditional construction sector. It also quashes the myth that traditional sectors are fairly slow to adopt IT when compared to sectors like ITES and finance. In fact, the approach taken by this company is an example for other players in this industry to follow suit, so that everyone can leverage the power of IT, especially its emerging technologies like cloud, AI, IoT and machine learning.

Going forward, Travis Perkins aims to create a successful product catalogue that’ll allow customers to buy their products through the self-service portal. It also wants more employees, even those in warehouses, to use its IT systems to log incidences and track their progress.

Though these goals are sometime away, the cloud process has nevertheless started.

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