Pantaloon’s ambitious IT plans

Chinar Deshpande CIO, Pantaloon Retail India

Pantaloon Retail (India) Limited (PRIL) has an ambitious IT roadmap. It has lined up IT investments of over Rs 100 crore for the next three years. These investments will go into its lifestyle and value retail businesses. A complete revamp has started, with the first step being a strategic partnership with SAP to implement the mySAP Business suite, SAP advanced planning tool for merchandise planning and SAP apparel and footwear solutions across the organisation with over 1,000 users.

Chinar Deshpande, CIO, PRIL, says, “To support growth, a robust and futuristic IT infrastructure has been planned for the next three years, with investments of over Rs 100 crore. Our strategic partnership with SAP is our first step in realising our IT vision.”

As the precursor to this, PRIL has implemented a company-wide VPN connecting all the stores, warehouses and offices. The network is capable of handling heavy traffic of data, voice and video. As part of its second phase, the company plans to implement a fully-integrated transaction system (SAP) which would accumulate accurate real-time data.

PRIL also plans to implement a data warehouse and a business intelligence tool on top of the transaction data accumulated by the above systems. A set of advanced corporate planning tools is also being put in place including forecasting & demand planning, budgeting and variance, inventory planning, space planning, promotions planning and analysis, and human resource management systems.

The investments will be mainly in the areas of hardware, software, business connectivity infrastructure (such as VPN, and video conferencing) and skilled IT manpower.