How Whole Foods is empowering its employees safely and cost-effectively
There’s no industry as empowered by its employees as the retail industry. From associates in the aisles to buyers on the go, working effectively is paramount to success.
That’s why today’s modern technology tools—those that help employees be more mobile, collaborative and insightful—are so critical throughout the retail organization. Those retailers that arm their employees with the tools and information they need, when and where they need them, stand to leap ahead of their competition in customer satisfaction, productivity gains and employee retention.
The challenge for retailers though is to strike the right balance between access for all and security, and without breaking the bank. Whole Foods, one of the top organic grocers in the world, is one retailer who has found a way to do that.
To support its rapid growth, Whole Foods needed an easy, cost-effective, and secure way to provide its more than 91,000 employees—including its 71,000 store workers—with access to both cloud-based and datacenter-based applications.
It’s using Microsoft Azure Active Directory Premium, integrated with its on-premises Active Directory, to provide single sign-on to more than 30 software-as-a-service applications.
With this hybrid model, which it rolled out in just 12 weeks, Whole Foods has reduced identity and access management work and reduced its help-desk support costs by 32 percent—critical gains for a retailer. Just as important, network security is enhanced, even with 91,000 employees hitting the corporate network from myriad work and personal devices.
To learn more about this technology initiative, you can read the full case study here and check out the infographic below.
And if you’d like to find out more about how Microsoft can help you increase productivity for all your retail employees, while meeting the needs for identity-enabled security, I talk more about this here. Another great new productivity resource for retailers to take a look at is Microsoft StaffHub, a cloud-based platform that enables deskless workers and their managers to manage time, communicate with their teams, and share content, across all your devices.
LinkedIn: Tracy Issel
