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Pantaloon: ERP in retail
Needing an organisation-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.
Rakesh Biyani |
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 fulfil orders according to strategic merchandising plans and optimise 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 optimise the next phase of the design process.
| Aim |
: |
To deploy a robust transaction
management system and an enterprise-wide platform to run its operations.
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| Solution |
: |
SAP retail solution |
| Implemented by |
: |
SAP team with the help of Novasoft,
Singapore |
| Number of users |
: |
Around 1,200 |
| Time taken |
: |
About six months |
| Cost of implementation |
: |
About $10 million |
|
The implementation
Chinar Deshpande |
“The implementation was outsourced to a third party.
The implementation was done by the SAP team with help of Novasoft 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.
| 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 i (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.
|
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 organised 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.
Future projects
After the successful implementation of SAP for its retail chain, Pantaloon plans
to go ahead with IT projects such as implementation of WMS with RFID, Customer
Intelligence and CRM. Inventory and Promotions Optimisation will be pursued
later this year.
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