Seacom, Zensar tie up for RPG Retail

PUNE: Seacom Solutions (India) Ltd, a Pune-based vertically focussed company developing retail solutions, has tied up with Zensar Technologies Ltd for providing retail solutions.

Seacom Solutions provided the first POS (Point of Sale) solution to Food World, a part of the RPG Retail. Under this tripartite arrangement, Seacom will customize its retail product called SmartShop to suite the business requirements of each RPG Retail Group beginning with Giant - the first hypermarket in the country and work along with Zensar to integrate their MMS system. Under this alliance, Seacom will transfer the source code of the customized modules to Zensar/RPG Retail, strictly to be used for RPG Retail only.

The Zensar-Seacom tie-up aims to provide a front-end which is user friendly for easy operation by cashiers with minimum levels of IT education, secure against pilferage and completely customer-centric- fast, accurate and incorporating customer loyalty features. The back-end, meanwhile, will take care of the store management in terms of inventories, movement of goods, pricing, planning promotions, collecting and organizing customer data and providing a comprehensive MIS.

RPG Retail has major plans of setting up the new chain of hypermarkets in India called Giant beginning this year. The first store encompassing 5000 sq feet is located at Hyderabad. RPG Retail has plans to establish 9 such Giant stories across the country during the first year. RPG Retail has over 100 stores located in the

southern and western parts of the country and is expected to have as many as 250 stores within a year's time. Says Ajay Agarwal, CEO and MD, Seacom, "Our expertise in retail has given us a strong functional and domain base and we now operate as retail consultants, providing retail solutions to exploit every possibility to automation offers, to anticipate and enhance the scope of each individual retail business." SmartShop will take care of the front end of the business while Zensar will concentrate on the back-office solutions. Agarwal sees a scope of business of around Rs 1.5 crore in RPG Retail in a span of 3 years. Seacom expects a turnover of Rs 6 crore for the current year.

He said that the retail market in India would grow from Rs 4,000 crore in the year 1999 to Rs 23,886 crore in the year 2005 at the rate of 20 per cent. The organized retail market is expected to grow to Rs 29,500 crore in 2005 with more focus shifting to hyper markets.

According to Deepak Shikarpur, global head (manufacturing, retail and distribution), Zensar, his company has its own strong back-end product MMS and recently tied up with RPG Retail as their retail solutions provider for all the retail activities of RPG Retail. This includes all the RPG Retail outlets - Food World, Music World Health and Glow and the newly launched Giant.

The Zensar and RPG teams evaluated many vendors in India and abroad and settled on Seacom SmartShop front end components as the most suitable to their list of requirements.

This agreement for RPG Retail will begin initially for a period of three years, covering not only product development but also customization, enhancement, maintenance and support for this period. Although this relationship begins specifically for RPG Retail, it is expected to open up avenues between both companies to work together not only with other large retailers in the Indian market but also in the global market. Seacom is further expected to work as a partner to provide Zensar functional expertise that will support their growth in the retail segment worldwide.