Home Hardware Saves endless hours on technology evaluations

Home Hardware Stores Limited is Canada's largest independent home improvement retailer. The company is owned by close to 1,100 independent small business operators from every corner of Canada, who operate under one of four banners: Home Hardware, Home Hardware Building Centre, Home Building Centre, and Home Furniture.
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"Home Hardware was created by and for independent dealers who believed in a community that would serve the Canadian hardware retail industry's common good."
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‍We interviewed Ken Kennery, IT Business Solutions Manager – Dealer Support at Home Hardware Stores Limited. Ken has been with Home hardware for 35 years.

What was your software selection process before Olive?

Very traditional. Our team would get the magic quadrant info, make phone calls, manually log this information, putting everything into excel. This was the normal process for vendor recruiting before Olive.

How has your technology evaluation process improved after implementing Olive?

How do you put a number to all the different resources used when doing all that legwork. Hours spent by one or many people in at least getting you down to dozen or so vendors. Once you are in Olive, all that information is in there. Core people on the project can look at requirements without needing to meet them. IT and project stakeholders can remark on each solution's pros and cons and give a rating to each vendor within Olive. All of this is done individually at any time, day or night. It was really time-saving.

Olive's services removed that legwork and that heavy lifting of finding out which vendors to evaluate. It saved us from going to Gartner to determine which vendors are best in the specific area we were looking in. Olive had the contact names, which can be a bit of work to get, and followed up with them. All of that upfront work is really helpful, and folks who had done it or before or been involved with it in the past agreed.
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The tool itself is great for centralizing everything in one spot. I can be assured that all of that upfront work is going to be handled for me.

With Olive I can...

I can be confident that Olive has done all the research that I would have to have done and don't need to do anymore. With Olive, I have the list of the vendors that I'm going to be dealing with, and can move forward with scheduling meetings and demos with them. Using the app to review how their responses and answers measure up to our questions and requirements has saved an endless amount of time.

How has Olive improved collaboration and transparency?

VPs at Home Hardware appreciated the simplicity of of getting to a point in the technology evaluation process. We've seen that as a win for us, within the IT group. In general, the business was happy to collaborate in the tool and be a part of this IT project and work in the Olive platform instead of collaborating with just spreadsheets and emails.

How would you feel if Olive disappeared tomorrow?

It would be a mistake to drop Olive and go back to the traditional way of selecting software vendors after seeing the value it brings, and time saved doing all that upfront legwork. It would just be silly to go back to phone calls and emails after using Olive. And then of course, going back to the old way would mean projects would take longer.