How does JYSK's IT department keep up with that scale, and even improve quality, with such a small team? Here's what the JYSK Client IT Team's own experience reveals about their approach.
Before Applixure
- Flying blind on device performance. No data on how PCs were actually behaving, only the things employees reported through support tickets.
- Slow problems stayed invisible. Long login times (up to 7 minutes), crashing applications, unexpected software failures, staff just lived with it, and IT never saw it.
- Reactive firefighting at scale. When POS machines started performing slowly, the team spent roughly half a year diagnosing the cause. As Thøgersen puts it: "When POSs are having problems, it starts to cost money easily; some potential revenue may walk out the door in a lost sale."
The Scale Behind the Storefront
A typical JYSK store has 4 PCs and 6 to 10 people working in shifts. Multiply that by 1,500 stores across 21 countries, and the picture behind the storefront looks very different from what a customer sees at checkout.
Beyond the stores themselves, the headquarters in Aarhus, Denmark, and support functions in Poland and other countries keep the whole multinational retailer running, including leaders, designers, purchasing managers, marketing people, IT, accounting, and many more, all depending on the same fleet of devices working reliably.
Why IT Needed to Become Core to the Business, Not Just Support
As JYSK kept (and keeps) growing, it became clear that IT needed to be part of the core business rather than a background support function. "In this new growth plan, critical success factors were described, and the maximum uptime was stated for end-point devices, hoping to give stores and office workers a better experience," says Flemming Thøgersen, IT Team Manager at JYSK.
JYSK’s Starting Point: No Idea How the Fleet Was Actually Performing
At that time, JYSK had no real idea of how well its PCs were performing. Support tickets were the only data available; the team would get a ticket, fix the specific problem, and move on, without any overall understanding of how the fleet was working as a whole.
That gap became expensive in a specific, memorable way. At one point, point-of-sale devices started performing slowly, and the IT team spent roughly half a year trying to figure out why and find a workaround. As Thøgersen puts it: "When POSs are having problems, it starts to cost money easily. It is not good when customers have to wait to be able to pay, and some potential revenue may walk out the door in a lost sale."
Working Half-Blind: What Tickets Never Showed
JYSK's IT department didn't have much data to base decisions on, on how end-point devices, computers, and applications were actually serving employees or not. Like many IT organisations, they only saw their environment through the lens of support tickets.
"The problem with relying on support tickets for visibility is that you don't see annoying things," Thøgersen explains. "People know that it takes them time to contact support, and it's probably going to be down-prioritized, so they try to live with the issue instead. You only see the critical breakdown issues."
The reality with tickets is that they're seldom properly tagged or classified, and there's no way to know about recurring issues without relying on memory. A practical example: someone at the head office turns on their laptop in the morning, and it takes 7 minutes before they can start work. Long logon times were exactly this kind of problem, something the Client IT team simply wasn't aware of.
"That's how it is. That's what they are used to, just regular business, but that's not how it should be. These things never come through the support," Flemming explains.
The same pattern showed up elsewhere: crashing applications and software that didn't behave as they should. Outlook crashes, for instance, are common and something people have simply learned to live with.
Where Applixure Fits In
These are exactly the kinds of blind spots Applixure is built to close: visibility into device performance, login times, application crashes, and POS health across a distributed fleet, without IT having to wait for someone to file a ticket. JYSK now runs Applixure across its store and office fleet, giving the Client IT team a continuous view of the things that used to stay invisible until they became critical.
In Their Own Words
"The problem with relying on support tickets for visibility is that you don't see annoying things. People know that it takes them time to contact support, and it's probably going to be down-prioritized, so they try to live with the issue instead. You only see the critical breakdown issues."
— Flemming Thøgersen, IT Team Manager, JYSK
Running a fleet that's growing faster than your IT headcount? Start a free 30-day trial or book a demo — Applixure deploys in 15 minutes.
