Case Study
How Konexis delivered a 9x ROI
Retail
Tesco Business Solutions (TBS), the award-winning global services arm for Tesco (the UK’s largest supermarket) worldwide, needed to help in the visualisation of their strategic plan. The Programme Director of Group Technology approached Konvergent to develop a strategic roadmap for eight core business areas across global services and group technology. The core focus was on clarifying what the team was doing and demonstrating it to the Global CEO in a way that could be instantly understood, something that had not been previously achieved. He feared many duplicate programs, but the way the information was communicated made it almost impossible to see.
The concern was that as a result of this fogginess in in communication that resources were not being deployed in the right areas, and that the domain leads were working together in their own silos and not communicating which each other. A issue made harder still due to the fact that the team was spread across England, Ireland, Scotland, Hungary and India. The Programme Director required everything to be visible to align projects with strategic objectives. The current way of working was to combine a well-known product roadmap tool and PowerPoint, but this just was not giving them the clarity that they needed, and they knew that there was a lack of alignment, but it just was not clear on what the issues and problems were, due to the visual communication breakdown. Enter the strategic roadmap.
The primary challenge was assisting the domain leads in aligning their projects and initiatives with four core objectives that the CEO had already defined. The CEO had identified the four objectives as critical to the company’s overall strategy, and projects needed to align with those.
The domain leads often needed help with prioritisation and focused on the wrong projects, which led to projects that lacked strategic importance in receiving budget allocations. This project combined the use of Konexis as a tool to deliver the end product with significant roadmap consulting to understand the current risks, issues, and pain points across what was quite a diverse group of stakeholders.
This communication gap was creating expensive bottlenecks. The organisation calculated that delays in strategic decision-making were had already cost approximately £190,000, with potential downstream impacts exceeding £2 million over the subsequent years. The multi-year transformation programme had numerous potential configurations, but without effective tools to compare and evaluate these options, reaching consensus on priorities proved nearly impossible.
Konxsis’ sister company, Konvergent, began by conducting an extensive analysis, including crucial stakeholder interviews, across the eight core business areas to identify the critical strategic objectives. This analysis helped identify areas where the business could reprioritise efforts and resources.
Based on the CEO’s four core objectives, Konvergent collaborated with the domain leads to help them align their projects with these objectives. The domain leads often needed help prioritising and focusing on suitable projects, with some very reluctant to let go of projects that had become highly personal to them. Konvergent employed a structured approach to help domain leads identify strategically essential projects aligned with core objectives. As is often the case, the same problem was being looked at multiple times.
Early feedback sessions worked well, and the feedback on the alignment was encouraging. The CEO, Sumit Mitra, requested that he see everything in process and planned on a page. However, there was a problem. Konvergent realised very quickly that none of the available roadmap solutions on the market could satisfy this need, as they were all product-based roadmaps that could not provide the on-a-page view required.
So, Konvergent went to Tesco Business Services with an innovative approach. If you provide us with the funds, we will build the roadmap you want and create a usable prototype in Adobe XD to satisfy the team’s needs while the roadmap is being developed.
The feedback from the domain leads and the Group CEO, Sumit Mitra, was fantastic. The CEO was incredibly impressed with Konexis and said, “It’s fantastic; I love it,” during the core workshop, which was first demonstrated to him due to the simplicity and ease with which the roadmap could be understood and used. As a global CEO who made thousands of decisions daily, he appreciated that the white noise surrounding previous roadmaps had been removed. The filtering system allowed him to focus on what was relevant. He also enjoyed the before-and-after comparison, which clearly showed which projects had been removed from the roadmap.
The domain leads were also impressed with the solution. They appreciated the structured approach, the clarity it brought to the project prioritisation process, and the filtering element that made it easy to find and prioritise projects, making it a very easy-to-use visual communication tool.
Konexis helped the domain leads focus on suitable projects that were strategically important and aligned with the core objectives. This led to a more efficient use of resources and helped ensure that the company’s overall strategy was being implemented effectively, aiding in their next three-year strategic planning cycle.
Twenty-four months later, is Konexis still in constant use, and has its breadth expanded far more comprehensively across the organisation? It is considered a core strategic communication tool.
On the final version of the roadmap, Konvergent was able to remove 36 projects that were deemed unnecessary. The original version included 83 projects, but the final version comprised 47 projects that required delivery within the next 12 months. The total average value of these projects was estimated to be between £2.2 million and £3.5 million. By utilising Konexis as a key strategic communication tool to demonstrate how initiatives aligned or did not align with key strategic objectives, it was able to deliver a conservative estimate of a 9x ROI. It ensured the removal of at least 10 duplicate projects from the roadmap.
So, this is how Konexis was created, as a direct result of a request from one of the biggest supermarkets in the United Kingdom, and it has been widely acknowledged as one of the best shared services companies in the world. This partnership afforded Konexis immediate credibility in a competitive market and deep insights into enterprise-level requirements. Quite an incredible first client – one that fundamentally shaped Konexis’s trajectory and established an immediate foothold in what would typically be a challenging market to penetrate
Konexis has also taken on some of the feedback from the ACCA and is implementing significant improvements in H1 2025 detailed on our product roadmap.
Experience the difference Konexis can make to your strategic communication. Get started and try our roadmap tool for free with a one month trial.
