Meet WHSmith

WHSmith is a leading global travel retailer for travel essentials. The retailer operates more than 1,200 stores, predominantly in airports in more than 30 countries across the world, including a major presence in both the United Kingdom and North America.

The challenge

The WHSmith Exec Board will agree on a target of new store openings and capital expenditure budgets for remodels, refreshes, and strategic projects at the start of each year. The Construction and Program Management Office is responsible for reporting and execution.

That team manages projects from start to finish, covering everything from minor works to constructing new stores and refreshing their current units.

But their previous tools and processes came with too many limitations.

Previously, they could only track construction in isolation, making it hard to manage the full project lifecycle and cross-functional milestones. Those silos in ways of working created limitations in reporting where progress was stalling and in identifying recurring themes.

The lack of visibility made it difficult to hold teams accountable and keep projects moving forward, adding an element of complexity and risk to project execution.

A lack of live reporting also meant they had to schedule reporting around the four-hour data syncs if they wanted to make decisions with accurate, real-time data.

“We needed a tool that was agile and nimble enough to flex between giving construction what they need, but would also give us the strategic oversight that we need as well,” says Matthew Smith, Group Construction PMO Manager at WHSmith.

The solution

With monday already driving real impact for their Retail Delivery Team, the Construction and Program Management Office was confident it was the best platform for them and could deliver the agility, accountability, and real-time reporting they needed.

Portfolio management insights in seconds

“We can report on our three different portfolios: International, Strategic, and Travel UK,” says Lauren Tate, Project Manager – Reporting and Governance at WHSmith. “Our portfolio is massive, but we can view everything in seconds.”

With monday, WHSmith’s team now has access to real-time data, eliminating the delays caused by waiting for syncs or outdated reports.

“Things change so quickly. We can now pull a report 20 minutes before a meeting and know it’s right,” says Tate. “Whereas before, we had to time the report around the data sync.”

The key? Flexibility in how Smith and Tate report and the autonomy to build those dashboards independently.

“I’ll do a six-week lookahead, which is something I wouldn’t have done beforehand,” says Tate. “monday.com gives us that ability to customize views and reports effortlessly, because the filters are so easy to use. If you want to see a two-week or six-week view, you can change that very quickly.”

Collaboration across multiple teams

With multiple departments using monday, the Construction and Program Office is able to centralize work and collaborate with their Brand, Retail Delivery, and Business Development teams.

In fact, monday is where some of those teams come together to capture and manage the punch list — which documents all scope agreed upon, missing features, and extra requests in stores.

Punch lists and in-store photos are added to the relevant project in their monday boards.

“That’s brought us all together and we’re working more collaboratively,” says Smith. “Because it’s all there in one place, we can monitor closing those punch items, and we use that across our travel and international stores.”

With a lean team of construction project managers internally, they use external support and the monday guest feature to collaborate with them on relevant projects.

By bringing them into monday, they’re able to measure KPIs for their ongoing performance alongside other process improvements, like building cost estimates and a new store opening database, their team has been able to improve productivity and efficiency in how they work.

The impact

With confidence, they’re able to predict and identify risks in delivering the new store opening target outlined in their annual strategy.

“With monday.com, we can identify projects where we know they’re in the bag and they’re going to happen. But we can also pull out the ones we know are at risk based on either the date they were presented or where they are in the current process,” says Smith.

This allows them to flag those risks to key internal stakeholders and have the right conversations to get projects back on track. Leadership reporting that used to take a day or more now happens in just a few hours.

Previously, the team used one template for every type of project — which estimated that they’d all take 19 weeks.

By centralizing and tracking all projects in monday, they now have better visibility and knowledge of how long each type of project typically takes at WHSmith.

“Now we’ve got better flexibility to say, actually, this is a kiosk and we’re going to turn it around in less than 19 weeks,” says Tate. “We’ve developed the ability to confidently crunch timelines — and some of our projects are now accelerated.”