-
Technology
-
Industry
-
Solutions
-
- ASSET MANAGEMENT
- CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT
- CYBER SECURITY
- DATA CENTER
- DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT
- ELECTRONIC DATA INTERCHANGE
- ENTERPRISE DATA MANAGEMENT
- ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING
- ENTERPRISE RISK MANAGEMENT
- ENTERPRISE-GRADE WEB DATA SOLUTIONS
- FACILITY MANAGEMENT
- FIELD SERVICE
- IDENTITY AND ACCESS MANAGEMENT
- INFRASTRUCTURE
- IT SERVICE MANAGEMENT
- MANAGED IT SERVICES
- PAYMENT AND CARD
- PROJECT MANAGEMENT
- SOFTWARE TESTING
- STORAGE
- VIDEO SOLUTIONS
- WORKFLOW
-
-
Platforms
-
Functions
- Leadership Perspectives
- Innovation Insights
- Research
- Magazines
- News
- CXO Awards
ServiceChannel Helps Wolverine Worldwide Empower Its Stores with Transparent and Efficient Facilities Management
CIO Review
NEW YORK: ServiceChannel, the leading SaaS service automation platform for facilities managers and contractors, today announced that Rockford, MI-based Wolverine Worldwide has deployed its facilities management software to better manage its repair and maintenance requirements across 300 stores comprised of some of the most familiar brands in footwear including Sperry Top-Sider, Merrell, Hush Puppies, Sebago, Saucony, Stride Rite, and Wolverine Boots.
Wolverine’s selection of ServiceChannel Service Automation was based on several criteria:
1. The company wanted to replace its under-performing, third party-based outsourcing model for procuring qualified vendors.
2. It wanted to centralize its work order management process to replace its highly disparate systems and processes due to the integration of new brands through mergers and acquisitions.
3. It wanted to modernize its inefficient invoicing and budgeting processes that provided limited oversight, visibility and control in these operational areas.
“Overall, the level of service we were getting with our previous outsourced facilities management approach was not good,” said Corey Kuntz, Manager of Store Construction and Facilities at Wolverine Worldwide. “It seemed that none of the stores were sure what was happening with their repair and maintenance work orders, and there was often a mismatch of expectations between what was promised and what was delivered.”
In addition, without transparency into their facilities program, there was no oversight into not-to-exceed (NTE) limits and limited visibility into what contractors were charging or the proposal approval process. Lack of data also resulted into lags in budget tracking. And with service providers, the company not only didn’t know who was going to its stores but even whether they were insured properly.
A key benefit that Wolverine gained through ServiceChannel was the ability to empower its stores with the means to manage their repair and maintenance issues actively via their own store dashboard, with guidance and oversight from the FM team. Having the stores more directly involved helped the company and the FM team manage these issues more strategically, including prioritizing work orders based on urgency.
“In the past the stores could only call in work orders, and everything was an emergency,” Kuntz said. “Not everything is an emergency now, and now we can manage the requests in a more cost-effective and efficient way.”
Working with ServiceChannel also helped Wolverine refresh its nationwide vendor network with the most qualified service providers available. Specifically, Wolverine relies on ServiceChannel FixxBook and Compliance Manager to source qualified contractors and ensure that they were fully compliant with requirements such as payment terms, insurance, and licenses.
This gave Wolverine’s facilities management team more visibility and control over their vendors including the ability to measure their responsiveness for accountability and performance management. It also enabled them to implement a formal RFP process, which gave the company more flexibility on the vendors with whom it chose to work.
ServiceChannel Analytics was also an essential and enabling tool for improved vendor accountability. Using a mix of real-time and historic data that the platform generated, Wolverine’s FM team was able to implement a quantitative contractor scorecard that tracked a number of key performance indicators such as on-time arrival, time-to-issue resolution and spending to plan/proposal.
“Our contractors are now in front of their scorecard performance and it’s something they’re proud of; they wear it like a badge,” Kuntz said. “We also now have a better feel where we’re spending our budget. It’s not just a bill at the end of the month.”
The newfound transparency gives Wolverine better control of the entire facilities management process. The service automation platform lets them do RFPs/proposals, resulting in more flexibility in deciding with whom to work. On the cost side, it’s already seeing gains through NTE optimizations, as those can now be updated immediately. Additionally, the company has been able to streamline and simplify how it processes and generates invoice & payment in bulk/batches for vendor services with ServiceChannel Payment Manager.
“There’s no longer a bunch of back and forth phone calls where we just reacted, and found out what happened a month later,” Kuntz said.
Wolverine is currently evaluating other tools in the ServiceChannel portfolio as next-phase deployment projects. For example, the team is evaluating ServiceChannel Asset Manager as a way to automate the management of its store equipment and other corporate assets. Wolverine is also planning to expand the use of ServiceChannel within the company through system-to-system integration as well as training non-FM personnel to use service automation. The use of ServiceChannel Site Audit Manager to improve the company’s Loss Prevention program is an example.
“With issues getting addressed faster and easier, we expect to see better stores with an improved customer experience, as well as have more of a handle on our costs because of using ServiceChannel,” Kuntz said. “Having everything in one place is a big benefit for all of our stores.”
More in News
Organizations are increasingly looking to upgrade their applications and expand their digital capabilities, making cloud computing essential for improving business performance. Effective management of a cloud environment demands specific skills, constant monitoring, and careful cost control. Managed cloud service providers are crucial in assisting companies to operate efficiently.
Current trends show a shift from traditional infrastructure management to integrated services that emphasize security, automation, optimization, and achieving positive business outcomes.
What Are the Best Practices for Hybrid and Multicloud Management?
Businesses are also increasingly embracing the hybrid and multicloud approach in addressing application needs, compliance issues, resiliency, and flexibility. As such, there is an increased need for organizations to embrace providers that will handle workloads in public cloud, private cloud, and multicloud through unified processes.
Rather than having separate approaches for each cloud environment, organizations have been developing capabilities for monitoring, governance, identity management, and performance management on a centralized basis. There has also been significant investment in automation in such areas as provisioning, configuration management, patching, scaling of workloads, and incident response.
AI and machine learning continue to play a role in the management of cloud services. Intelligent monitoring may be able to detect odd behavior, predict future capacity needs, and assist with problem-solving efforts. Predictive analysis can also help service providers detect any possible future problems that would negatively impact performance. With the advancement of such technology, companies will be provided with more flexible cloud services without building their own competencies.
How Are Providers Improving Cloud Cost And Security?
Optimization of costs in cloud computing has emerged as a key corporate concern as more value needs to be derived from technology investments. In response, managed cloud service providers have begun adopting approaches that involve resource analysis, identification of unused capacity, configuration recommendations, and efficient workload management.
The FinOps framework has also begun to gain relevance as it involves collaborative efforts from finance, technology, and business stakeholders to align cloud expenses with tangible results. This would help corporations understand their resource consumption and make better technology investments.
Security is still closely tied to the emphasis on efficiency. There are growing expectations for managed service providers to incorporate such security capabilities as identity and access management, monitoring, vulnerability management, data protection, and compliance support into daily cloud activities. The traditional approach of viewing security as a distinct function is now being replaced by integrating security controls into the infrastructure and application environment.
Other trends include the shift towards an outcome-oriented approach to delivering services. Companies are not only assessing the availability of their infrastructure but have shifted their assessment towards application performance, user experience, resiliency, scalability, and cost effectiveness. Service level agreements are now geared more towards operational outcomes, while dashboarding and analysis provide visibility of performance and utilization. ...Read more
The increasing cyber risk situation is forcing organizations to re-evaluate vulnerabilities originating from applications, networks, cloud environments and connected devices. Moreover, weak access controls, outdated configurations and gaps in security practices can represent a more favorable attack surface for malicious activity; whereas fragmented security processes may lead to increased difficulty in identifying and containing isolated incidents.
Cybersecurity consulting services assist organizations with these concerns through risk assessments, vulnerability reviews, security audits and incident response planning based on the operating environment of the organization. Clear security policies, employee awareness measures and defined response procedures can further strengthen preparedness and support a more coordinated approach to managing cyber threats.
How Can Cybersecurity Consulting Services Strengthen Business Security?
One of the major results of such cybersecurity consultancy includes increased protection of sensitive information from possible threats. The consultants can help organizations set up appropriate security measures for protecting the confidentiality of client information, financial information, intellectual property and other critical data. This helps minimize the likelihood of expensive data breaches while strengthening trust and confidence among customers, business partners and other stakeholders.
Cybersecurity consulting services can guide businesses to align their security practices with relevant regulatory and sectoral requirements. A better understanding of compliance obligations may also help to mitigate the risk penalties, legal issues and delays that can arise from non-compliance. External expertise can further provide an objective view of security gaps that may be overlooked during internal reviews, helping decision-makers prioritize security investments according to business needs.
An improved level of resilience in cybersecurity can help ensure smoother business operations in case of a security incident. A well-prepared organization is able to minimize the disruption, keep its key functions safe and restore itself quickly following a security incident. Availability of specialized knowledge can also alleviate the burden on internal IT teams, especially for those organizations that do not have any specific experts in the area of cybersecurity.
What Trends Are Shaping Cybersecurity Consulting Services?
The rising trend of adopting cloud native operations is also having an impact on the realm of cybersecurity consulting, especially as organizations manage increasingly distributed digital environments. Zero trust frameworks have become popular as firms begin to shift their paradigm from implicit access controls and begin to adopt continuous verification for users, devices and resources.
Consulting engagements are also becoming more focused on identity security, third-party risk and security considerations across software supply chains as organizations rely on a wider network of external platforms and providers.
Another key factor is the impact of artificial intelligence, especially as organizations look for ways to speed up their analyses of security events and detect threats in a more proactive manner. Consultants are being engaged for security needs tied to the AI systems themselves, such as data exposure, model misuse and unauthorized access.
Demand is also shifting direction towards continuous security monitoring and managed consulting models, allowing organizations to have access to ongoing guidance instead of one-off assessments. These shifts are broadening the role of cybersecurity consulting services as digital operations become more distributed, interconnected and dependent on emerging technologies. ...Read more
A software engineering and AI analytics purchase can fail long before model accuracy becomes a concern. The bigger challenge is often the handoff between existing infrastructure and new analytics, especially when camera networks and edge devices were never designed to share context. Replacing everything may simplify architecture on paper, but it can strain capital requirements and stretch deployment timelines. Buyers need to know whether a platform can work across existing technology boundaries without turning modernization into a wholesale infrastructure project.
Integration depth is therefore more revealing than the number of AI features on a product sheet. A useful platform should accept heterogeneous inputs and expose their data through a common control layer without forcing every piece of existing hardware to conform to one technical standard. It should also preserve the usefulness of legacy assets while making their information accessible to newer analytics. That matters in distributed environments where hardware replacement may be slow or economically unjustified. The real question is whether modernization can proceed around installed infrastructure rather than requiring a clean slate.
Real-time analytics creates an attention problem of its own. Video feeds and sensor events can overwhelm staff when every detection is treated as equally important. Buyers should examine how a platform separates routine activity from events that merit human review, and then look at how quickly those events reach the people responsible for validation. The difference between raw monitoring and useful analytics lies in this filtering step. A system that produces more alerts without improving prioritization merely transfers workload from observation to triage.
Architecture becomes more consequential as data volumes rise. Sending every high-definition stream to a centralized cloud environment can create avoidable bandwidth costs and response delays. Edge processing can reduce that burden when analytics are performed close to the source and only selected information moves upstream. Yet edge deployment introduces management demands. Devices and application services still need a coherent way to exchange information and support later investigation. Buyers should also examine how much infrastructure complexity is added when analytics move closer to the source.
“ CFBD ’s hybrid architecture connects legacy environments to newer computing infrastructure through hyperconvergence and virtualization.”
Searchability deserves equal importance. Once video or sensor data has been transformed into structured metadata, teams should be able to move from live detection to later investigation without manually reviewing hours of footage. Useful systems retain descriptive attributes and behavioral context in forms that can be queried quickly. The buying question is whether that context survives across live monitoring and retrospective analysis rather than being trapped in separate workflows. Fast retrieval matters because delayed investigation can erase much of the advantage gained from real-time detection.
CFBD merits consideration for buyers facing this mix of integration pressure and analytics workload. Its AZOR Ecosystem, a real-time data orchestration platform, centralizes video and sensor information. AZOR Panel, a centralized monitoring interface, receives AI-filtered events for human validation. AZOR Analytics, a video analytics component, supports real-time and forensic analysis, while edge gateways can process video near the source and pass lighter event data upstream. Its hybrid architecture connects legacy environments to newer computing infrastructure through hyperconvergence and virtualization. The fit is strongest where replacement costs and operator overload are material constraints. For organizations that need AI analytics without discarding usable infrastructure, CFBD is a practical choice. ...Read more
Customer outreach is moving faster than many compliance programs were designed to govern. A campaign assembled in hours can pass through several applications before a call, text, email or prerecorded message reaches a customer, while autonomous agents compress that cycle further. The exposure is no longer limited to whether a record appeared on a suppression list. Consent status, channel permissions, time-of-day rules and state or federal restrictions can change the answer at the moment of contact. A platform that checks too late leaves legal teams reconstructing decisions after the communication has already occurred.
Static controls also create a quieter commercial problem. Large enterprises often carry separate customer records across business units, and a broad opt-out can be applied far beyond the product or channel the customer intended. Conservative suppression may reduce legal exposure, yet it can also remove legitimate audiences from campaigns and weaken the return on CRM or marketing technology investments. Effective governance needs enough context to distinguish a prohibited contact from an allowable one without forcing every business unit to maintain its own interpretation of the rules. The harder test is whether those distinctions survive as consent records move between systems and outreach programs change.
“Gryphon’s deterministic rules-based decisioning evaluates contact permissions in real time, while automated evidence capture gives legal and compliance teams a defensible record of why each decision was made.”
Speed matters at the decision point, not merely during campaign preparation. List scrubbing and periodic audits remain useful for certain tasks, but neither is designed to govern communications that originate across contact centers, individual employees, enterprise applications and autonomous agents. Decisioning should sit inside the existing workflow and evaluate the applicable permissions before outreach proceeds. The answer also needs to return quickly enough that compliance does not become a queue. Enterprise scale is equally important. A control layer that works only for one channel or one application recreates the same fragmentation it was purchased to remove. Policy changes also need to propagate without campaign teams waiting for separate rule updates in each downstream application, especially when restrictions take effect quickly.
Defensibility separates governance from simple blocking. Executives should expect a clear record of the rule applied, the evidence used, the policy version and the reason a communication was allowed or stopped. Those records need to remain searchable as regulations and internal policies change. Deterministic decisioning has particular value where an organization must later explain exactly why a contact was permitted. The same discipline helps compliance teams identify oversuppression rather than treating every uncertain record as unusable. Buyers should also examine how readily the platform connects to existing CRM, contact-center, marketing automation and governance systems, since a long replacement project can undermine the speed advantage that real-time controls are meant to provide.
Gryphon is the premier choice for enterprises that need contact governance embedded directly into customer engagement rather than added as a later review. Its platform applies real-time controls across voice, SMS, email and interactions generated by AI agents while integrating with existing enterprise applications. Gryphon’s deterministic rules-based decisioning evaluates contact permissions in real time, while automated evidence capture gives legal and compliance teams a defensible record of why each decision was made. Compliance Hub extends that visibility into audit research and reporting. The platform also identifies contacts suppressed too broadly, helping organizations preserve legitimate reach without relaxing policy enforcement. For buyers balancing regulatory exposure against legitimate customer contact, point-of-contact enforcement paired with documented decision logic makes Gryphon a practical recommendation. ...Read more
