JYSK

We partnered with JYSK to support their customer first strategy, deliver better digital products faster, and realise the potential for omni-channel success through an agile transformation.

Getting closer to the customer

JYSK has more than 3,500 stores and a market presence in 50 countries, with ambitions to expand far beyond its Danish roots and European core markets. Since its beginning in 1979, JYSK has maintained the vision to always provide customers with great offers in store, and increasingly in recent years, online.

Having just reported another record increase in turnover of nearly eight percent, reaching DKK 41.4 billion (GBP 4.6 billion), JYSK was well placed to continue growing. However, with substantial growth in both the number of stores and employees over a short period, JYSK was finding it difficult managing increased complexity and respond to rapidly changing market conditions, trends, and regulation. These challenges had slowed the delivery of new digital initiatives, hindering business growth, and seamless omni-channel shopping experiences.

JYSK needed to build organisation-wide agility to pursue new digital trends and technology opportunities such as AI-powered personalisation. This meant enhancing the ability to pivot and adapt quickly to the continuously changing requirements.

Making business agility a top priority

JYSK needed to redesign its digital operating model to ensure end-to-end value flow and minimise dependencies to reduce time-to-market.

“We’d used agile methods before, but we weren’t getting the full benefits, and delays on strategically important initiatives meant we weren’t fully realising our ambition to be closer to our customers,” explained Keld Marott, CIO, JYSK. He continued, “to cope with complexity and stay relevant to our customers, we needed to reduce time to market for new ideas. We knew that PA is a leading agile transformation consultancy and that’s why we turned to them.”

We established a transformation team that worked shoulder-to-shoulder with JYSK’s people. The team was tasked with reviewing all aspects of the organisation to build true end-to-end value streams, covering everything from purchasing, through to ensuring reliable logistics services, and to provide customers with a convenient omni-channel shopping experience.

We anchored the transformation as a strategic priority, with the Executive Management Team spearheading the transformation. By building the case for change around JYSK’s enterprise strategy of “being seamless and closer to the customer”, we were able to clearly communicate how reducing time to market was a key driver for JYSK to succeed.

Enhancing collaboration through a common language and multi-disciplinary teams

We strengthened the collaboration between business and IT teams by forming cross-functional teams, with the skills needed to define, build, test, and deliver value end-to-end. Assigning full-time roles within these teams, further boosted internal collaboration and stability, which improved delivery flow, reduced handovers, and accelerated the release of features.

Building organisation-wide agility

Our approach has allowed JYSK to effectively prioritise between numerous ideas and initiatives across the organisation. Potential ideas include offering vouchers and coupons online and in stores and implementing a new web shop all underpinned by JYSK’s unified commerce platform. By leveraging our experiences with Lean Portfolio Management, we helped to define the framework and processes that provide transparency across the portfolio and build understanding of the most valuable initiatives, ultimately driving better outcomes for JYSK.

The increased transparency of what is happening across the organisation has made JYSK able to pivot quickly and respond and has made it easier to catch and address bottlenecks, dilemmas and challenges. By starting small and refining as they go, JYSK has become more proactive, catching potential issues early and turning them into opportunities.