Retail industry challenges are unique and dynamic

'Retail industry challenges are unique and dynamic'

Tata Group’s retail venture Trent goes into an IT over-haul to prepare for the great leap ahead

Friday, June 08, 2007

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Shashwat Chaturvedi

A few years ago KVS Seshasai, head (IT & Corporate Quality), Trent (Westside), was a wee bit baffled. The IT infrastructure in place at his chain of Westside stores seemed to be working well, and yet as he was sitting on the cusp of a major expansion drive; he wasn't sure whether the solution that was best suited for the future. What is good for the goose is more often not enough for the gander.

That is when Seshasai decided to go in for an overhaul and change his existing IT infrastructure. "The challenges of the retail industry are quite unique and very dynamic. We need to constantly come up with new discount schemes and other such promotions and this can only be done if you have a robust infrastructure in place," he said.

Trent plans to open close to 10-20 hypermarkets across India over the next few years and the flagship brand is Star India Bazaar. The company has already ventured into the hypermarket format and has already set up one such facility in Ahmedabad and is in the works to roll out the next few. The need to manage such large volume transactions in an efficient way was the reason that made Seshasai opted for a new retail IT infrastructure based on SAP platform.

"As we were starting from scratch, we did not encounter any teething troubles like legacy software or applications that needed to be integrated or over-hauled. Also the staff could be directly trained on the new package. From the very onset, for Star India Bazaar, we had decided to create an integrated IT infrastructure that incorporated the latest in best practices," added Seshasai.

For its Westside apparel stores located all across the country, Trent was using the solution Retail Pro, a point of sale, inventory control and retail management software. The company had also deployed Shawman CRM for its customer loyalty programs and other solutions. Seshasai went in for entire SAP Retail suite of applications and implemented them in a "big-bang manner".

With TCS as the implementation partner, the shift was not all that irksome. "There were certain changes that we had to make to the package, namely customize it for our needs. Take the instance of MRP, the concept of MRP is very unique to India, in no other market can one find the system of maximum retail price. The good part is that, we were able to easily customize the solution to suit our requirements," he further said.

The other thing, Seshasai seemed to be most conscious about is customer care. "While IT helps retailers manage their supply chain, inventory, etc in an efficient manner, the single largest improvement is brought in terms of customer satisfaction. With IT we are able to run complex promotions, which otherwise would not have been possible in a manual system thereby giving good value for money for the users."

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