CITY Furniture

Since CITY Furniture’s humble beginnings in 1971, the home furnishings store has grown to nearly thirty showrooms across Florida, a thriving e-commerce website, and more than 3,500 employees. In the process of growing into a large company, the existing system for recording and resolving service desk issues had become too cumbersome and time-consuming for their rapidly expanding company.

“We were using ServicePro for tickets, and at the same time we were using Atlassian’s Jira for our software engineers to manage their backlogs and do sprint planning. But, if you were an associate at the company, you didn’t have access to Jira. It took a lot of time and effort moving tickets from ServicePro over to Jira,” said Britney West, Managing Director of Technology at CITY Furniture.

The CITY Furniture team knew they needed to get the company operating in one system, and that Jira Service Desk (now Jira Service Management) was the best fit for their needs. But for that, they would need some help, as they hadn’t previously used the platform. After reviewing different Atlassian partners, they found Contegix had the technical expertise and no-nonsense approach that’s essential for a seamless transition to Jira Service Desk and simplify the entire service ticket process.

Migrating to a Unified System

The initial move to Jira occurred at a critical time for the company. CITY Furniture was in the process of adopting new sales tech that, unfortunately, was not without bugs. As a result, the IT team sought an efficient system for submitting and resolving service issues.

Fortunately, Contegix was able to help—and act quickly. Initially, only the employees in the tech department (around 100 people) had access to Jira. Within three months, Contegix was able to onboard 1,500 additional employees into the platform, and service desk issues could be resolved through the same system with the click of the button.

The success of the initial project led to other departments, including marketing, turning to Contegix for assistance in moving to automated processes in Jira. Now, nearly the entire organization is onboarded to Jira—a total of 3,500 employees.

“Visibility is big for our company, especially in a virtual environment. By allowing other departments to manage their demand, along with visualizing the demand that they're asking of, the tech has been very significant in allowing us to make sure we're on track and give us the right progress updates,” said West.

Going Beyond Jira Onboarding

Though the initial project Contegix focused on onboarding Jira Service Desk management for tickets, the CITY Furniture team was so impressed with their work that they tapped Contegix to streamline their intake process after Jira was up and running. “Jira Service Desk was solely focused on tickets, for things like new laptop requests. I needed a way for the business to be able to request projects, enhancements, and changes. Everything was coming through email or Slack and it was very difficult to manage,” West explained.

West brought in Contegix to help create an automated tech request process. “We are now able to halt anybody from going outside of Jira to request demand, and Contegix automated it nicely to make it easy for us to prioritize and approve demand,” added West.

CITY Furniture also appreciated Contegix’s proactive ideas on how to make Jira work best for their company’s needs. “Contegix really came up with a lot of ideas,” West said. “They’d tell us, ‘This is what Jira can offer and we can get this done for you.’” It’s been so successful in the tech department that three additional sectors of CITY Furniture have reached out to try to implement similar request systems.

Boosting Long-term Efficiency and Cost Savings

Reducing the systems needed has not only led to greater cost savings for the company, but has also increased the entire organization’s visibility with a single source of truth. That means each team can focus on the right priorities. And, because engineers are using fewer systems, they no longer have to repeat tasks—leading to better overall work/life balance.

Despite these gains, Contegix has not slowed down its efforts in optimizing the company’s Jira process. Now that it has become a true enterprise tool for CITY Furniture, they are conducting an audit of the system to see what other advances can be made in terms of automation and efficiency. “We're really concerned about our security and our account management,” West said. “Are we implementing things incorrectly? Do we have too many fields? Are we wasteful?” Contegix’s audit will provide feedback on how CITY Furniture can improve these processes.

“We are so pleased with the innovative solutions to issues we’ve seen from Contegix. They’re always quick, fast, and reliable. It was a huge undertaking, but they’ve continuously done a great job,” said West.

See how Contegix can offer your team strategic, hands-on support implementing Jira Service Management. Learn more now.