Indian Case Studies:

UNIT 14 INDIAN CASE STUDIES: USES OF Uses of IT in Retail

IT IN RETAIL
Structure
14.0 Objectives
14.1 Introduction
14.2 Pantaloon: ERP in Retail (Case-1)
14.3 Infiniti Retail (CROMA): IT Infrastructure for Retail Chain (Case-2)
14.4 Trent Strengthens Security with an Open Source Solution (Case-3)
14.5 Powering POS Operations at SPENCERS through Smart Shop (Case-4)
14.6 Hypercity Automates Distribution Centres’ for Efficiency (Case-5)
14.7 Let Us Sum Up
14.8 Key Words

14.0 OBJECTIVES
After studying this unit, you should be able to:
● explain the decision of Pantaloon to implement an ERP system from SAP;
● discuss the decision to move to Microsoft Exchange Online in order to boost IT
efficiency;
● describe an open source solution that helped Trent to secure its applications and
earn an edge over their peers in terms of operational efficiency and ability;
● elaborate powering POS operations at SPENCERS through smart shop; and
● identify the reasons to automate distribution centres’ for efficiency.

14.1 INTRODUCTION
Technology has been an area of intense focus in retail industries for enhancing efficiency
in all areas of operation. Improvements have been made in areas such as supply chain
management, inventory management, customer experience, and loss prevention. Wireless
technology, permitting communication between people and devices anywhere and without
cables, has enabled the dramatic transformation of business processes in the past, and
continues to do so. However, wireless deployments in the past have been limited by
security requirements, the cost of deployment, inadequate management solutions, lack
of standards, and availability of innovative solutions. Rapid advances in wireless local
area network (WLAN) technology in recent years along with widespread adoption of
the technology in the consumer and enterprise space have eliminated many of these
roadblocks. Today, a new wave of opportunity exists for retail industries to improve
margins through the use of wireless technology. In this unit, you will learn uses of IT in
retail sector with special reference to Indian retailers.

223
IT Application in
Retail 14.2 PANTALOON: ERP IN RETAIL (CASE-1)

About the Company

Pantaloon Retail is the flagship enterprise of the Future Group, with a presence across
multiple lines of business. The company owns and manages multiple retail formats that
cater to a wide cross-section of Indian society. Headquartered in Mumbai (Bombay),
the company operates through four million square feet of retail space, has over 140
stores across 32 cities in India and employs over 14,000 people. The company registered
a turnover of Rs 2,019 crore for FY 2005-06. Pantaloon Retail forayed into retail in 1997
with the launching of its fashion retail chain, Pantaloons in Kolkata. In 2001, it launched
Big Bazaar, a hypermarket chain. This was followed by Food Bazaar, a food and grocery
chain. Next up was Central, a first of its kind located in the heart of major Indian cities.
Some of its other formats include, Collection (home improvement products), E-Zone
(consumer electronics), Depot (books, music, gifts and stationary), aLL (a Little Larger,
fashion apparel for plus-size individuals), Shoe Factory (footwear) and Blue Sky (fashion
accessories). It has recently launched its e-business venture, futurebazaar.com. The
group’s subsidiary companies include, Home Solutions Retail India Ltd, Pantaloon
Industries Ltd, Galaxy Entertainment and Indus League Clothing. The group also has
joint venture companies with a number of partners including French retailer Etam group,
Lee Cooper, Manipal Healthcare, Talwalkar’s, Gini & Jony and Liberty Shoes. Planet
Retail, a group company owns the franchisee of international brands like Marks &
Spencer, Debenhams, Next and Guess in India.
Needing an organization-wide IT solution to help it perform better, Pantaloon decided to
implement an ERP system from SAP. By Kushal Shah
More than eight years after it forayed into the retail business, Pantaloon Retail decided
to implement SAP to keep itself competitive in the rapidly growing Indian Retail Market.
Store operations have never been as important to retailers as they are now. Successful
retailers are those who know that the battle for customers is only won at the frontline,
which in the case of a retail chain is at its stores. Pantaloon was regularly opening stores
in the metros and there was an urgent need for a reliable enterprise wide application to
help run its business effectively. “The basic need was to have a robust transaction
management system and an enterprise wide platform to run the operations,” says Rakesh
Biyani, Director, Pantaloon. The company was looking for a solution that would bring all
of its businesses and processes together. After a comprehensive evaluation of different
options and software companies, the management at Pantaloon decided to go in for
SAP.

The Solution
Some of the qualities of SAP retail solutions are that it supports product development,
which includes ideation, trend analysis, and collaboration with partners in the supply
chain; sourcing and procurement, which involves working with manufacturers to fulfill
orders according to strategic merchandising plans and optimize cost, quality, and speed–
variables that must be weighted differently as business needs, buying plans, and market
demand patterns change, managing the supply chain, which involves handling the logistics
of moving finished goods from the source into stores and overseeing global trade and
procurement requirements; selling goods across a variety of channels to customers,
which requires marketing and brand management; managing mark-downs and capturing
customer reactions, analysing data, and using it to optimize the next phase of the design
process.
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 Indian Case Studies:
Aim : To deploy a robust transaction management system and Uses of IT in Retail
an enterprise-wide platform to run its operations.
Solution : SAP retail solution
Implemented by : SAP team with the help of Nova soft, Singapore
Number of users : Around 1,200
Time taken : About six months
Cost of implementation : About $10 million

The implementation: “The implementation was outsourced to a third party. The

implementation was done by the SAP team with help of Nova soft which is based out of
Singapore,” says Biyani. Some people from Pantaloon also assisted in the project. About
24 qualified people worked on this SAP implementation. SAP was chosen as the
outsourcing party on a turnkey basis. This project was headed by Pantaloon’s Chief
Information Technology Officer, Chinar Deshpande.
Three Phases: SAP implementation is not a single phase process. The project was
divided into three phases.
The first phase involved blueprinting existing processes and mapping them to the desired
state. In this phase, the entire project team worked on current processes within the
structure of the organisation, analysed and drafted them. This blueprint was later used
in the formation of new states of the solution. Since the SAP would combine all the
processes, each and every one of these had to be evaluated.
In the second phase, the SAP platform was developed with the help of Novasoft’s
template which was predefined by SAP after evaluation of Pantaloon’s needs and expertise
in retail solutions.
The last phase in this project was for stores to switch over to the new system and for
current data to be ported. Before the SAP implementation, all the data was unorganised.
This data had to be migrated to the new SAP application.
The project was flagged off on 15th June 2005 and took about six months to finish. It
went live at the head office on 1st January 2006. The stores went live on SAP from 1st
January 2006 to 30th June 2006.
Benefits and Challenges: The key challenges in this project were not in the
implementation. Rather, the difficulties were faced during the data migration and in
managing the interim period when the project was underway for about six months.
Migrating unorganised data to an organized format is a challenging task. Pantaloon has
not been able to see immediate benefits from this implementation. This application certainly
has long term benefits which will be seen when the performance of various aspects will
be analysed. “It is too early to calculate RoI. We have already started working on MAP
(Merchandise Assortment Planning), Auto-Replenishment and Purchase Orders. We
hope to use these systems to optimise our inventory and cut it by about two to four
weeks (depending on the line of business),” says Biyani.
Maintenance & Hardware: This application is currently being used by around 1,200
employees across the organisation. For maintaining this implementation and its related
applications, Pantaloon has an in-house team and it has outsourced ABAP resources.
They are also in the process of setting up a SAP Competency Centre. The system runs
on a HP Superdome server on HP UNIX 11i and the database is from Oracle. The cost
of this project was about $10 million.

225
IT Application in Future projects: After the successful implementation of SAP for its retail chain,
Retail
Pantaloon plans to go ahead with IT projects such as implementation of WMS with
RFID, Customer Intelligence and CRM. Inventory and Promotions Optimization will be
pursued later this year.

Source: WEB LINK-http://www.networkmagazineindia.com/200703/casestudy02.shtml

Questions
1. Discuss the main problems faced by the company.
2. In your opinion do you think that the steps taken by the company to improve
operational efficiency are satisfactory. Give your arguments.

14.3 INFINITI RETAIL (CROMA):

IT INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RETAIL CHAIN
(CASE-2)

National Chain of Retail Stores Moves to Hosted Solution, Reduces TCO by

25 to 30 Percent
To boost IT efficiency and give employees access to unified communications, Infiniti
Retail decided to move to Microsoft Exchange Online, a part of Microsoft Business
Productivity Online Standard Suite. It is now benefiting from simplified data backup and
recovery, along with improved mobile access to email. Additionally, the move to the new
solution has resulted in improved communication, collaboration, and productivity; reduced
IT effort; and a 25 to 30 percent reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Business Needs
Infiniti Retail, a TATA Enterprise, operates a national chain of multi-brand electronics
stores under the brand name Croma. Croma is one of India’s first national, large formats,
specialist retail chain of consumer electronics and durables. The 64 stores with new
ones opening regularly across the country offer more than 2,500 products and 180 brands
in seven categories.
Retail today is all about being better, faster, and leaner. Whether you are a global chain
or an internet-only outlet, the willingness to adapt and adopt is essential to survival.
Infiniti Retail maintained its email servers on-premise. The company had two exchange
servers, both of which were five year old and were running on Microsoft Exchange
Server 2003. With around 2,700 employees, of whom 700 were email-enabled employees,
email was critical. And, as the number of stores and employees both were increasing,
approximately 10-25 email ids had to be created every month. To safeguard against disk
failures, backups were taken on tapes, which is again a cost. At times, there were
backup job failures, which required manual intervention to troubleshoot, which was time-
consuming task. Another significant challenge was setting up a disaster recovery server.
With such an old infrastructure, hardware support had ended and so hard disk scalability
in the server and creating these email ids was turning out to be a challenge. The hardware
had reached the end of its life, as support for the servers was no longer available. In
addition, new versions of messaging software offered many more services and features,
such as unified communications. Refreshing the entire infrastructure was inevitable,”
says Mr. Nadeem Malim, Senior Manager – IT, Infiniti Retail. “We needed to provide
226 state-of-the-art IT services without the need for large on-site infrastructures.”
Solution Indian Case Studies:
Uses of IT in Retail
The company evaluated couple of on-premises, hosted, and leading cloud-based messaging
solutions. After a proof of concept, it finally made the decision to go with Microsoft
Exchange Online, a part of Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite, a
cloud-based set of messaging and collaboration tools, delivered as a subscription service.
The solution gives businesses rich capabilities without the need to deploy and maintain
software and hardware on-premise. “The POC showcased how cloud solutions can
reduce costs, improve agility, and enhance global consistency,” says Mr. Nadeem Malim.
Infiniti Retail partnered with Microland, Microsoft Infrastructure Partner, for the
deployment of the solution. Infiniti Retail migrated its 700 email users in just 60 days to
Microsoft Exchange Online. “The switchover was absolutely smooth for us and we
could access the same email as before,” says Mr. Nadeem Malim. Users can access
the advanced email, calendaring, contact management, and task management features
of Exchange Online through the Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010
messaging and collaboration clients, or they can use Microsoft Outlook Web App to
access the same functionality from almost any web browser. IT staffers can now create
bulk email ids in few minutes, with no worries about storage and server sizing, etc.
Additionally, they no longer need to perform backup operations to ensure redundancy
for their messaging environment. Instead, mailbox data is continuously replicated to
Microsoft data centers in distributed geographic locations.
Exchange Online runs in secure Microsoft data centers that are geographically redundant.
In addition, mobile support for smart phones enables devices to quickly connect mobile
users to email and other messaging functionality. Capabilities provided by Office Live
Meeting are also under evaluation to conduct virtual meetings for project teams,
Operations, HR interviews and groups, where face-to-face meetings would be difficult.
This would also reduce some traveling expenses. The capabilities provided by Business
Productivity Online Standard Suite all work together along with Microsoft Office desktop
applications to deliver a seamless experience.
Benefits: Hosted IT Reduces TCO by 25 to 30 Percent
Because Infiniti Retail outsources its IT, the team doesn’t have to think about server
management, back-up, disaster recovery, installing and upgrading software, monitoring
security, troubleshooting or any other IT maintenance issues. All this is taken care of by
Microsoft. “We just pay a monthly fee and it’s all managed for us,” says Mr. Avijit
Mitra, Chief Financial Officer, Infiniti Retail. “Eliminating the need to buy or manage
infrastructure means tangible savings. We estimate that our TCO will reduce by 25 to
30 percent.”

Easy to Manage System Reduces IT Effort

The company’s move to Microsoft Business Productivity Online has also yielded
productivity gains by reducing system administration workload by approximately around
25 to 30 hours a month. Because Microsoft hosts and manages the servers, the company
does not have to invest in hardware or the administrative support required to deploy and
manage solutions in-house.

Integrated Solution Boosts Productivity

The company is confident that seamless access to email, calendars, contacts, and business
documents increases workforce efficiency. Exchange Online offers scalable and cost
effective solution to enable such seamless access. ,” says Mr. Avijit Mitra.

227
IT Application in Source: http://www.microsoft.com/india/casestudies/microsoft-business-productivity-
Retail
online-standard-suite/infiniti-retail/national-chain-of-retail-stores-moves-to-hosted-
solution-reduces-tco-by-25-to-30-percent/4000010691
Question
1. What are the basic problems faced by the company? Discuss the measures to
overcomethe problems faced by the company?

14.4 TRENT STRENGTHENS SECURITY WITH AN

OPEN SOURCE SOLUTION (CASE-3)

Executive Summary
At Trent, the retail arm of the Tata Group, life centered on their cash tills. But it was also
open to security challenges. Besides the cash till software wasn’t centralized and required
to be physically managed. Read how an Open Source solution helped Trent secure its
applications and earn an edge over their peers in terms of operational efficiency and
agility.
Retail is in the detail.” That’s a mantra that resonates across Trent House, the corporate
office of Trent, the retail arm of the Tata Group. It’s a philosophy is driven by Noel Tata,
MD, Trent, known for his eye for detail. It’s also a strategy that helps Trent stay on -
what some experts call - its ‘conservative’ course. Although ‘conservative’ turned ‘smart’
when Trent maintained profitability - one of the few retailers (possibly the only Indian
one) - during the growth frenzy that the sector faced a few years ago. That conservative
tag, however, can’t be applied to Trent’s IT operations. Headquartered in Mumbai,
Trent operates multiple formats including Westside (its lifestyle retailing stores); Star
Bazaar (its value retailing stores and hypermarkets) and Landmark (its books and music
retail chain).

Case Study Highlights

Leaky Cash Tills: At Trent, the IT team led by Vikram Idnani, the retailer’s head of
IT, was trying to figure out how they could prepare the company for growth by infusing
it with more operational ability and flexibility. Like all retailers, Trent’s life centered on
their cash tills. When it snapped open with a characteristic ka-ching!, it made everyone
glad. But it was also open to security challenges. For instance, the system allowed some
staffers access to sales data because the POS and the backend interacted via flat files
and these were available to some people in a store’s back office. “The fact that my day-
to-day sales data was accessible to someone before he sends it out to the head office
was the biggest sign of a security gap in the system. Also, we did not have visibility. If a
store manager was removing some transactions, it would only come out in a post-facto
analysis, when finance did not get the money they expected. Our objective was to have
a system where the stores had no access to sale data after sales were closed,” says
Idnani.
Also, Trent’s business demanded quick deployments and better control but each time
the IT team made a change to the cash till’s software, it needed to ensure that the
update was replicated across all of Trents multiple format stores - quickly. And that
could only be done with a centralized set up - something Trent didn’t have. “Earlier, we
needed someone to go to a store physically and make sure he configures the cash till for
every single store,” says Idnani. The rising cost of managing their cash tills was also
beginning to pinch. “A cash till should be a highly efficient, robust, secure, and cost
228 effective piece of equipment,” says Idnani. “With the existing number of tills we were
facing a challenge of increasing costs. And we knew that this problem would only be Indian Case Studies:
Uses of IT in Retail
compounded as we expanded. Mind you, this was a time when Trent’s revenues were
growing a consistent clip of 55 percent CAGR. We were planning to add 10 new stores
for both Westside and Star Bazaar over the next two years.” Typically, each Westside
store has between seven and nine cash tills. By adding 10 stores a year, just Westside
would have 90 more tills to manage. And Star Bazzar has about 30 tills a store, so 10
new stores meant 300 more tills. “The growth in the numbers could lead to a huge
escalation of our costs,” says Idnani.
Open Source Decisions: With plans for expansion already in the works, Idnani had to
move fast, but he also needed a technology solution that offered a holistic solution.
When Idnani joined Trent in June of 2006, the enterprise depended on a platform called
Retail Pro for its purchasing and tracking the movement of its goods. It also acted as
their point of sale. But Trent was quickly outgrowing the software. “We were looking at
SAP and a front-end solution as RetailPro would not be able to scale anymore. With this
in mind, we decided to have a bespoke front-end. That was the threshold moment that
drove us to look for a new solution,” says Idnani.
But an Open Source solution in the Indian retail industry was unheard of, he says. So he
decided to evaluate other solutions. He looked at an off-the-shelf product which operated
on a Windows platform. “It was not a popular product but it was from a very stable
company. It didn’t make the cut because it could not contain cost over a long period.
The product addressed the need for centralization, but we knew that with Windows
there would always be a security risk at the cash till. And with Windows, we would end
up spending a lot of money buying licenses for each new release. On the other hand,
Open Source would help keep our costs significantly lower. We realized that if we
chose an Open Source solution it would give us a lot of agility and we were also keen to
take advantage of flexibility and cost efficiency it offered,” says Idnani. Idnani next
challenge was securing buy-in from his executive peers. He made a presentation that
demonstrated how the Open Source solution would benefit Trent in building business
agility, saving costs, and attaining a high level of security - many of the same reasons
that convinced him. Management saw merit in the case and gave Idnani the go ahead.
With that out of the way, Idnani was faced with another challenge: his team was ill-
equipped to work on an Open Source platform. They had no prior exposure to it. In fact,
Trent was going to be the first retailer in India to use an Open Source platform, Idnani
says. He quickly put his entire infrastructure team through intensive training. Idnani
then took another important decision: Trent would not embark on the project in a phased
manner because they could not have some stores on one platform and the rest on
another. But for that strategy to work, they had to seal every loophole in their plan. “So
we did a pilot with two Westside stores in Mumbai for about six to eight weeks,” says
Idnani.
Teething Troubles: When Trent embarked on the Open Source initiative, it was also
engaged in multiple projects at the same time. It was in the middle of an ERP initiative
at the backend, an OS replacement at the front end and a POS replacement at the front
end. “We were revamping our whole business with this one go-live. From that point of
view it was a significant challenge. That’s the reason we went live late,” says Idnani.
That wasn’t the only challenge the team faced. Vendor support was a major issue that
hamstrung the implementation. “While there were a lot of promises from our provider,
they could not deliver on them. They had very good resources but very limited ones.
Hence pulling those resources for our work and getting timely help from them remained
a big challenge throughout the course of the project. It did not affect us to the point that
it hit our business but the closure of certain issues was definitely affected. So we had to
spend a lot of extra time on research to resolve these issues,” says Idnani, adding that 229
IT Application in despite the training, his people needed a fair amount of handholding after going live.
Retail
Idnani says the learning curve lasted for a good year.
Benefits Galore: When the project went live in June 2008, Trent became the first
retailer in India to go the Open Source route says Idnani. But he adds that the strategy
of using Open Source gave Trent an edge over their peers in terms of operational
efficiency, security and agility. “Since we went live we have probably had about probably
six to eight releases for our point of sales software across all stores. We have brought in
several new functionalities to our point of sales system and increased the speed of
deployment. So we have faster time-to-market. It helped us adopt new functionalities
across the stores before our competition,” says Idnani.
Take for example when Trent’s marketing team needed to roll out a new customer
loyalty program called the ‘Blue Tier’ program. The IT team made a quick change to
the POS and the program was deployed across 42 stores - all in just two days. This is a
far cry from the days when it took 20 days to roll out a new release across all Trent’s
stores. Trent has also accrued benefits in the area of cost efficiency. Over a four-to-
five year timeframe, Trent’s operating expenses are have been slashed by 40 percent,
says Idnani. With the deployment of the Open Source project, Trent has also upped their
security posture.
Source: http://www.cio.in/case-study/ka-ching

Question
1. Do you think that the open source solution executed by the company to strengthen
the security is a right step. Discuss.

14.5 POWERING POS OPERATIONS AT SPENCERS

THROUGH SMART SHOP (CASE 4)
The Customer: The Customer is part of an USD 3.25 Billion Indian Retail giant, and
is the pioneer of organized retailing in India. They have over 5 hypermarkets, and 50
plus stores across India.
The Business Challenge: Client need was that of an Intelligent POS system, which
can perform fast billing operations with extremely customer friendly interface and easy
to use workflow. The automated POS was required to fully integrate with the existing
Merchandise management system.
The Solution: Zensar integrated its proprietary POS with the existing Back Office
application. Most of the components of Smart Shop were customized to take care of
functionalities required by the client, and a few new components were also created to
give some client-specific functionality.
The Point-of-sale module was designed to take care of all the front office needs like
customer invoicing and check out, barcode scanning, multi-payment-mode tendering,
promotions implementation, discounts, customer look-up, suspending/recalling/voiding
invoices, accepting returns, reporting etc. The invoices/sales receipts were made to be
fully customizable. It also provided multi-level security to sales personnel for returns,
discounts, voids and direct pricing.
Business Benefits
● Custom India localization & flexible in handling various retail taxes.
● Enabled handling of both POS sales and Back Office Sales and managing of various
230 promotions and discount schemes run concurrently.
● One solution for integrated end-to-end retail operations across client stores, Indian Case Studies:
Uses of IT in Retail
warehouses, and headquarters.
● Ready integration with clients existing systems/applications.
● Dual screen display facility at the checkout counter.
● Built-in dynamic report generator tool for custom reporting.
● Ability to work in stand-alone mode.
Source: http://www.zensar.com/resources/case-studies/232-powering-pos-operations-
at-spencers-through-smartshop#ixzz1t2gECA6p

Question
1. Discuss the usefulness of POS operations at SPENCERS through Smart Shop

14.6 HYPER CITY AUTOMATES DISTRIBUTION

CENTERS’ FOR EFFICIENCY (CASE 5)
Hyper City Retail is a big-box hypermarket with three stores covering over 2.2 lakh
sq.ft. All the hypermarkets have ‘back-stores’ to store merchandise, but because retail
space is expensive these store-rooms only hold a day’s worth of inventory. The bulk of
Hyper City’s inventory is maintained at mammoth 200,000 sq.ft. distribution centers
(DCs) on the outskirts of a city. These DCs handle about a million SKUs and 1,200
vendors.
To make certain that the hypermarkets’ shelves are always stocked, the DC’s processes
have to be automated. DC personnel set themselves a target of achieving a minimum of
a 95 percent fill-rate across all categories for store transfers and also receive goods
with minimum vendor vehicle turnaround time. “It was clear that to ensure on time
fulfillment of store transfers, the DC’s processes had to be automated. In order to help
optimize various processes and reduce the time spent in the DC, we knew that the
solution had to run on a mobile device,” says Veneeth Purushotaman, head-technology,
Hyper City Retail.
Today, when a product arrives at the DC, the receiving team loads its purchase order on
a handheld scanner device. This helps reduce manual entry (and its accompanying
errors). Once the items are received, the warehouse management system prints out a
‘put-away’ document. This document is now available on the scanner and guarantees
that a DC staffer puts items away correctly. Finally, when it is time for inventory to be
moved to a store a ‘pick’ document is assigned to a ‘picker’ using a wireless hand-held
scanner. This document shows the exact location of a product and the number of pieces
to gather. If an item is not on the pick list an error message informs the picker. Within a
month of the implementation, staff costs at the DC fell by 23 percent, and sales rose by
25 percent. As envisioned, turnaround time fell by 12 hours, because errors from
misreading data virtually disappeared. Purushotaman’s solution also created a unique
bond between IT and business processes, creating happier employees. “Attrition is near
zero and the enthusiasm and motivation that the DC management system has generated
has helped the DC set new benchmarks for retail logistics and warehouse management
in India.”
Source: http://www.cio.in/case-study/hypercity-automates-distribution-
centers%E2%80%99-efficiency

231
IT Application in Question
Retail
1. Discuss the advantages of automation of distribution centres for efficiency.

Check Your Progress A

1. What is meant by ERP?
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2. What do you mean by Point of Sale?
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3. What is WLAN?
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4. What is merchandise assortment planning?
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5. What is meant by SAP?
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14.7 LET US SUM UP

Pantaloon Retail decided to implement SAP to keep itself competitive in the rapidly
growing Indian Retail Market. Store operations have never been as important to retailers
as they are now. Successful retailers are those who know that the battle for customers
is only won at the frontline, which in the case of a retail chain is at its stores. Pantaloon
was regularly opening stores in the metros and there was an urgent need for a reliable
enterprise wide application to help run its business effectively. Infiniti Retail, a TATA
Enterprise, operates a national chain of multi-brand electronics stores under the brand
name Croma. Croma is one of India’s first national, large formats, specialist retail chain
232
of consumer electronics and durables. The 64 stores with new ones opening regularly Indian Case Studies:
Uses of IT in Retail
across the country offer more than 2,500 products and 180 brands in seven categories.
The company evaluated couple of on-premises, hosted, and leading cloud-based messaging
solutions. After a proof of concept, it finally made the decision to go with Microsoft
Exchange Online, a part of Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite, a
cloud-based set of messaging and collaboration tools, delivered as a subscription service.
The solution gives businesses rich capabilities without the need to deploy and maintain
software and hardware on-premise. At Trent, the retail arm of the Tata Group, life
centered on their cash tills. But it was also open to security challenges. At Trent, the IT
team led by Vikram Idnani, the retailer’s head of IT, was trying to figure out how they
could prepare the company for growth by infusing it with more operational ability and
flexibility. Like all retailers, Trent’s life centered on their cash tills. When it snapped
open with a characteristic ka-ching!, it made everyone glad. But it was also open to
security challenges. For instance, the system allowed some staffers access to sales
data because the POS and the backend interacted via flat files and these were available
to some people in a store’s back office. “The fact that my day-to-day sales data was
accessible to someone before he sends it out to the head office was the biggest sign of
a security gap in the system. Zensar integrated its proprietary POS with the existing
Back Office application. Most of the components of Smart Shop were customized to
take care of functionalities required by the client, and a few new components were also
created to give some client-specific functionality. Hyper City Retail is a big-box
hypermarket with three stores covering over 2.2 lakh sq.ft. To make certain that the
hypermarkets’ shelves are always stocked, the DC’s processes have to be automated.
DC personnel set themselves a target of achieving a minimum of a 95 percent fill-rate
across all categories for store transfers and also receive goods with minimum vendor
vehicle turnaround time. “It was clear that to ensure on time fulfillment of store transfers,
the DC’s processes had to be automated. Within a month of the implementation, staff
costs at the DC fell by 23 percent, and sales rose by 25 percent. As envisioned, turnaround
time fell by 12 hours, because errors from misreading data virtually disappeared.
Purushotaman’s solution also created a unique bond between IT and business processes,
creating happier employees. “Attrition is near zero and the enthusiasm and motivation
that the DC management system has generated has helped the DC set new benchmarks
for retail logistics and warehouse management in India

14.8 KEY WORDS

ERP : It is a suite of applications including financials,
manufacturing, human resources and other
modules, that together automate the back-office
business administration functions of an enterprise.
Merchandise Assortment : It breaks the Merchandise Plan down into the
planning (MAP) components that enable the planner to address
customer preference and need. These components
are product attributes, styles, colors, and SKUs.
WLAN : It refers to local area network that uses high
frequency radio signals to transmit and receive data
over distances of a few hundred feet; uses ethernet
protocol or WLAN is one in which a mobile user
can connect to a local area network (LAN) through
a wireless (radio) connection.
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IT Application in POS : The physical location at which goods are sold to
Retail
customers. The point of sale is often more specific
than the general building or store where something
is sold, typically indicating the piece of technology
which is used to finalize the transaction.
SAP : It is an enterprise resource planning (ERP)
software or solution and using its application
programming one can effectively manage an
enterprise’s resources, people, money,
machines,etc.

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