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A Major Makeover
Last fall, viewers on The Oprah Winfrey Show were treated to the sight of Kirstie Alley, 56, in a bikini. The Jenny Craig spokesmodel credited the program with helping her shed 75 pounds. The accompanying before-and-after photos were indeed dramatic: The first featured Alley wearing a tent-like dress that could still barely contain her mountainous physique; the second displayed a fit-looking woman in a sexy cocktail dress. "You look beautiful," Winfrey cooed.
Jenny Craig's network makeover is almost as profound. In January 2006, while the company looked for a buyer, Nicoletti joined as director of IT. Prior to joining the company, Nicoletti had held the same position at a hotel company where she deployed leading-edge technology. At Jenny Craig, the acting CIO gave Nicoletti the mandate to rebuild the company's infrastructure and position it for future growth.
"I needed to keep today going but think for tomorrow," she says. "Could we branch out across the world? What can we do in the future? The answer has to be anything." By March, Nicoletti had a plan to deploy a wireless thin-client network.
It wasn't an easy sell; just a few years earlier, new owner Nestlé had rejected a thin-client deployment for its own business. "They challenged us on our selections," Nicoletti recalls. And so she dove into a due diligence effort to provide Nestlé with information on each element of the network. She explained how the network supported the company's business needs and how its longevity and cost made it a compelling proposition. Reducing hardware and keeping customer data at a central location also made the network more secure. "They asked a lot of questions, and they signed off," she says.
Jenny Craig picked integrator Igmas Technologies Inc. to deploy SonicWall Inc.'s WAN technology. In April, testing began, and four months later a center in Mission Viejo, Calif., went live in a pilot. In September, Jenny Craig rolled out the WAN.
But not everything worked out easily. The wireless network pilot project proved too prone to disruption, so Nicoletti has opted to hard-wire the network for now (although going wireless in the future is possible). Now, almost every night of the week when a Jenny Craig center somewhere closes for the evening, consultants work through the night installing the new hardware. At 7 a.m., the staff arrives for a quick training session, and an hour later the centers open for the day. As many as eight centers a night join the new network.
The new network can support wireless scanning and self-service kiosks should the company decide to deploy them. Nicoletti says the company noticed an immediate change in how easy it was to manage the network centrally. The daylight savings patch, for instance, took weeks to install at old centers but only an hour at new ones.
Nicoletti says the new network efficiencies have already eliminated two engineering positions, reducing the IT shop head count to 14. And the help desk staff of eight could get smaller too. "We should see a significant decrease," she says. (The company's IT department has undergone a downsizing as well; in 2006, when Nicoletti joined Jenny Craig, she was a size 16, a year later she had shrunk to a size 4. "The program absolutely works," she beams. "I believe in everything the company does.")
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