350-Store Wi-Fi Deployment for Hudson’s Bay Company — 6 Weeks Early and $500K Under Budget

A retail network infrastructure case study: how BAZ Group stepped in as internal project lead for a multi-year, 20,000-access-point Wi-Fi rollout — coordinating five deployment partners, cutting capital costs by 10%, and shaving six weeks off delivery time.

About Hudson’s Bay Company

Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) is one of the oldest and largest department store retailers in North America, operating hundreds of locations across the United States and Canada under the Hudson’s Bay and Saks Fifth Avenue banners. Managing the technology infrastructure of a retail operation at that scale — with stores ranging from flagship urban locations to mid-market regional centers — requires the kind of coordinated, multi-party execution that exceeds what most internal IT teams can manage alone.

Like many legacy retailers navigating a period of rapid consumer behavior change, HBC was under pressure to modernize its in-store technology to support evolving customer expectations — mobile payments, connected fitting rooms, associate communication tools, and the bandwidth-intensive applications that modern retail requires. At the center of that modernization was Wi-Fi infrastructure: the network that everything else depends on.

The Challenge: 350 Stores, 20,000 Access Points, and an Internal Team That Couldn’t Do It Alone

The strategic case for a Wi-Fi overhaul was clear. HBC needed to replace aging network infrastructure across 350 stores to support the next generation of retail technology and keep pace with rapidly changing consumer buying habits. Outdated Wi-Fi wasn’t just a technology problem — it was a competitive disadvantage that affected customer experience, associate productivity, and the viability of every digital initiative the company wanted to pursue.

The operational reality was more complicated. The internal IT team was already fully extended managing day-to-day infrastructure across a massive retail footprint. They did not have the capacity to design the deployment, engineer the solutions, run the RFP process for equipment and services, or coordinate execution across the number of third parties a project of this scale required. A capital shortage compounded the problem: without a large upfront budget, the project was on track to be phased over several years — a timeline that would leave HBC operating on degraded infrastructure for the duration.

The project needed to move faster, cost less, and run without pulling the internal team away from their existing responsibilities. That combination of requirements — accelerated timeline, constrained capital, and limited internal bandwidth — is precisely what BAZ Group’s Technology Deployment Services is designed to solve.

"BAZ was truly amazing. They understood our business objectives and designed and executed a multi-year, multi-phase project to get us the results we needed within our corporate constraints."

Charlie Shields — Network Director, Hudson’s Bay Company

The Solution: BAZ as Embedded Internal Project Lead Across Five Deployment Partners

BAZ Group’s engagement model for HBC was different from a typical consulting arrangement. Rather than advising from the outside, BAZ embedded directly into HBC’s IT function as the internal project lead — taking on the full scope of project ownership that internal staff didn’t have the capacity to carry. This meant designing the rollout, running the vendor process, managing contracts and billing, coordinating technical execution, and continuously refining the operating model as the project evolved across phases.

Project Design and Vendor Selection

BAZ designed the rollout approach from the ground up: defining the deployment sequence across 350 stores, structuring the phased execution plan, writing RFPs for equipment and deployment services, running the vendor selection process, and finalizing all third-party contracts. For a project of this complexity, the quality of the vendor selection process determines much of the ultimate outcome — the right deployment partners, under well-structured contracts, with clear accountability, make every phase easier to execute.

BAZ also coordinated optimal access point placement with third-party network engineers at each location — a detail-intensive process that directly affects both network performance and capital efficiency. Getting AP placement right the first time avoids costly remediation work and ensures that every access point installed delivers the coverage and capacity the design calls for.

Five-Partner Coordination and Technical Execution

Coordinating five independent deployment partners across a 350-store retail rollout is a project management challenge of genuine complexity. Each partner has its own processes, timelines, and ways of working. Without a single point of coordination holding the critical path together, delays compound, quality varies, and the internal client absorbs the cost of every misalignment. BAZ served as that coordination point throughout the engagement.

BAZ collaborated with HBC engineers to draft detailed technical rollout procedures and working documents for every deployment partner — ensuring consistent execution standards across all five firms and all 350 locations. As the project moved from phase to phase, BAZ continuously refined these operating procedures based on what was working and what wasn’t, increasing efficiency with each successive phase rather than simply repeating the same process.

Invoice Validation, Billing Management, and Asset Recovery

BAZ managed all third-party billing throughout every phase of the project — reviewing every invoice against contracted rates, authorized work, and delivered equipment. This ongoing invoice validation generated over $500,000 in savings across the project: charges for work not performed, rates that didn’t match contracts, and equipment billed but not delivered.

One of the most significant individual recoveries came from an asset tracking gap in one vendor’s system. BAZ identified discrepancies between the vendor’s records and actual deployment data, recovering hundreds of access points that had been recorded as lost — equipment representing substantial capital value that would otherwise have been written off and replaced. This kind of recovery requires the combination of detailed billing oversight and deep understanding of how large-scale hardware deployments actually work in practice.

Adapting to Business Needs in Real Time

Multi-year retail technology deployments don’t execute in a vacuum. Retail business conditions change — store performance, strategic priorities, capital availability, and operational constraints all shift over the course of a project. BAZ stayed tuned to HBC’s evolving business needs throughout the engagement, adjusting operating pace, sequencing, and resource allocation as circumstances changed. The result was six weeks shaved off the delivery timeline — not by rushing, but by identifying opportunities to accelerate where conditions allowed and eliminating friction that was slowing execution.

The Results: Cost Down, Timeline Accelerated, Internal Team Protected

Why BAZ Group: Taking on Broad Accountability Without Adding to the Internal Load

The HBC engagement illustrates what BAZ Group means when it talks about operating as an extension of the client’s team. This wasn’t a consulting engagement where BAZ provided recommendations for HBC staff to implement. BAZ took ownership of the outcomes — the design, the vendor process, the execution coordination, the billing, the quality — and carried that accountability across a multi-year, multi-phase program without becoming an additional burden on the internal team.

That model of embedded accountability is what makes large-scale retail technology deployments possible for organizations whose internal teams are already fully extended. The internal IT function continues to run the day-to-day. BAZ runs the project — to the standards, timelines, and cost targets that the business requires.

The $500K in invoice validation savings and the 10% capital cost reduction are partly a function of BAZ’s billing expertise. But they’re also a function of the engagement model: an independent project lead with no commercial relationship to the vendors they’re managing has every incentive to hold those vendors accountable to exactly what was contracted. That independence is structural, not incidental.

What drove the outcomes in this engagement:

• Embedded project lead model — BAZ took internal ownership, not just advisory responsibility
• End-to-end scope — design, RFPs, vendor selection, contracts, billing, execution, and asset management
• Five-partner coordination under a single point of accountability — consistency across all 350 locations
• Continuous process refinement — operating procedures improved phase-over-phase, not just repeated
• Invoice validation at scale — $500K+ recovered through systematic third-party billing review
• Asset tracking gap identified — hundreds of access points recovered that would otherwise have been written off
• Real-time business alignment — project pace adjusted as HBC’s operational needs evolved
• Full independence from all vendors — accountability to HBC’s outcomes, not vendor relationships

Frequently Asked Questions

What is retail network infrastructure project management?

Retail network infrastructure project management covers the planning, vendor coordination, and execution oversight of large-scale technology deployments across multi-location retail environments — including Wi-Fi rollouts, network upgrades, access point installations, and related infrastructure work. For retailers with dozens or hundreds of locations, this type of deployment requires coordinating multiple deployment partners, managing equipment procurement and billing, enforcing consistent technical standards across all locations, and keeping complex multi-phase projects on schedule. BAZ Group provides embedded project management that takes this work off internal IT teams entirely.

How do you manage a Wi-Fi deployment across hundreds of retail locations?

A multi-location retail Wi-Fi deployment requires a structured, phased approach: defining the rollout sequence and store prioritization, engineering the access point placement at each location, running a competitive vendor selection process for equipment and deployment services, building standardized technical procedures for consistent execution, coordinating deployment partners in parallel across multiple phases, and managing all billing and asset tracking throughout. BAZ Group managed all of these workstreams simultaneously for HBC across 350 stores — serving as the single internal project lead that held every partner and every phase accountable to the same standards.

How can technology deployment services reduce capital costs?

Capital cost reduction in large-scale technology deployments comes from three sources: smart sourcing during vendor and equipment selection (leveraging competitive bidding and volume pricing to reduce unit costs), invoice validation throughout execution (catching overbilling, unauthorized charges, and rate discrepancies before they’re paid), and asset recovery (identifying equipment that has been miscounted or misclassified to avoid unnecessary replacement purchases). BAZ achieved a 10% capital cost reduction for HBC through sourcing discipline and recovered $500K+ through ongoing billing and asset management — a combination that directly offsets the cost of the engagement.

What does it mean for BAZ Group to act as an internal project lead?

Acting as an internal project lead means BAZ takes ownership of project outcomes — not just advisory responsibility for them. In the HBC engagement, this meant BAZ designed the rollout, wrote the RFPs, ran vendor selection, finalized contracts, coordinated five deployment partners, managed all third-party billing, drafted technical procedures, and adjusted operating pace across phases as business needs changed. The internal HBC IT team remained focused on day-to-day operations; BAZ carried the project management load. This model is the practical definition of operating as an extension of the client’s team.

How does BAZ Group handle multi-vendor coordination in large deployments?

Multi-vendor coordination in large deployments requires a single point of accountability that all partners report into — someone with both the technical understanding to evaluate their work and the project management authority to hold them to schedule, quality, and cost commitments. BAZ served that role for HBC: drafting standardized technical procedures that all five deployment partners followed, reviewing deliverables against those standards, managing billing for every partner centrally, and escalating or resolving issues before they affected the broader project timeline. The consistency of execution across 350 stores — despite five different deployment firms — was a direct result of that coordination structure.

How does BAZ Group’s independence affect technology deployment outcomes?

BAZ Group’s independence from all carriers, vendors, and deployment partners is structural to how the firm operates — and it has a direct effect on deployment outcomes. An independent project lead has no commercial incentive to favor any vendor, overlook billing discrepancies, or accept substandard work to protect a relationship. In the HBC engagement, that independence enabled $500K+ in invoice validation savings and the recovery of hundreds of misbilled access points — recoveries that would be much less likely from a project manager with commercial ties to the vendors being managed. BAZ’s only interest is the client’s outcome.