Asics sharpens digital strategy with BusinessITScan^®

Asics has a long and rich history in designing, producing and selling sports fashion. Top athletes and recreational athletes enjoy the Asics quality every day. Since its founding in Japan in 1949 by Kihachiro Onitsuka, the organization has grown rapidly to become a global player with 8,000 employees and offices in 40 countries. Asics is an acronym of Anima Sana In Corpore Sano (Latin), which stands for a healthy mind in a healthy body. In addition to the Asics brand, the organization also owns the Onitsuka Tiger, Asics Tiger and Haglöfs brands.

As IT Director EMEA, Edwin Idema is responsible for all IT services in 15 countries in Europe, Middle East and Africa. He is also responsible for preparing the global IT delivery organization.

Edwin Idema: ‘When I joined Asics in 2008, all IT activities were organized locally in the countries. That was far from optimal: data sharing was not easy, processes and hardware were not standardized, and it was difficult to collect business performance data. Of course it couldn’t stay like that, certainly not at a company where performance comes first.’

‘In the years that followed, we worked hard with our colleagues to centrally organize many Business & IT services, always in close collaboration with colleagues in all countries. The result of that sporting and innovative journey is a professional organization, but above all a better service to our customers: athletes at all levels, from world top to recreational.’

Edwin continues: ‘In 2017, together with Ronald Hoogeboom from Altijd ContinuITeit, we thought about the next phase in our journey. At that time we worked with several smaller IT service providers that we managed ourselves. That was quite knowledge and labor intensive, while we wanted to focus more on what is really useful for our business: increasing productivity and innovation. We designed a transition plan to give fewer IT service providers greater responsibility, and to make our IT department more in control. We selected two medium-sized IT service providers with iSourcing Hub, they are gradually taking over operational IT services from us.’

Edwin: ‘The dashboard and the advisory report with the Six IT success factors gave us a quick insight into IT satisfaction, our processes and automation. Our internal IT customers and IT staff also made proposals to improve productivity and innovation. As a result, our vision, strategy and approach set out in 2018 “IT is more than technology” has been further sharpened.’

'The framework of the Six IT success factors, in combination with measuring with the BusinessITScan^® is very pleasant: it is very recognizable for our colleagues in Business and IT: the automatically generated advice, and the improvement proposals entered by colleagues can be linked directly to owners in our organization. The Priorities & Action module facilitates that, so that we can easily prioritize and follow up the improvement proposals.’

In the meantime, the collected insights have also been shared with the management teams. Edwin explains: "It is logical in our retail organization that everyone must switch quickly. Sports enthusiasts are becoming increasingly fashion conscious, so we have to change collections faster. We have to set up many business processes, data and information systems and adapt them faster. The dashboard of the BusinessITScan^® shows us where we are and where adjustments are needed. Adjusting this is a continuous challenge, in so many countries and with so many different colleagues. With our IT team it is wonderful that we can play a beautiful role in this every day.'

“We like to move IT!"