Argos Retail Group is the UK’s largest multi-channel retailer with more than 20 million customers. There is an Argos catalogue in over two-thirds of UK households, and 98% of the population live within ten miles of an Argos store.

Not surprisingly, IT plays a vital role in Argos’s continued success. Sandra Hall, Development Support Manager for Argos, had identified a need for a Project Control Database (PCD) to provide greater control over expenditure than the existing manual systems. The primary aim of the PCD was to become a central resource for managing expenditure.

“We needed the PCD to support a central repository of suppliers, projects and cost data, and to deliver a range of benefits including improved accuracy and efficiency in processing and reconciling purchase orders and invoices, better supplier relations through faster payment and improved project cost and performance reporting.”

"The native Sentences interface is extremely powerful and can eliminate the need to program browsing and query capabilities. It’s based on the Explorer metaphor with which all Windows users are familiar, so it’s very intuitive, and it harnesses the power of the associative model to let users explore the data and answer questions for themselves. As a departmental computing tool, Sentences has a great deal of potential for Argos."

    - Sandra Hall, Development Support Manager for Argos

read the full case study (pdf)

view a screenshot of the Argos PCD application