Retail's IT Flavor

Shoppers Stop

Shoppers Stop Limited (SSL) was founded by K Raheja Corp in 1991, laying the foundation of the modern retail industry in India. It started operations with the first store in sub-urban Mumbai and is now a multi-channel retailer with 33 large format department stores and online presence. It is engaged in the business of retailing a range of household plus consumer products and books through Shoppers Stop.Com (India), Shoppers StopServices (India), Upasna Trading, Crossword Bookstores and Gateway Multi Channel Retail (India). It houses international and domestic brands across categories such as apparel, accessories, cosmetics, home and kitchenware. The international brands retailed include Austin Reed, Mustang, Playboy, Calvin Klein, French Connection, Tommy Hilfiger, Esprit, Benetton, GAS, Chanel, Lancome, Guess, Hugo Boss, Diesel, Armani and US Polo.
With exclusive brands as well as domestic and international brands, Shoppers Stop continues its expansion across the country with the department stores, bookstores and hypermarkets. It invested in and acquired the Crossword Bookstores which now operates more than 50 stores across the country. It has also invested in HyperCITY, a hypermarket which has been rated amongst the top 100 stores worldwide.

Current IT infrastructure of the company: Shoppers Stop has been an early adopter of technology solutions and has won many accolades for IT innovation in the last three years. Industry recognition came in the form of 'Best Technology Usage' amongst retailers in India, an award presented by Indian Retail Forum in 2007. The company initially implemented Merchandising Management System (MMS), a JDA solution, and built upon the core system by adding various solutions from JDA including Arthur-merchandise planning tool, Intactix-space and floor planning solution, JDA Warehouse Management, JDA Win/DSS Point of Sale system, JDA E3 auto-replenishment system, JDA SODA-sales and order management system. The above systems are all deployed on the IBM iSeries platform. In 2007-08, the company invested in Netezza data warehouse appliance and SAS analytical tools, becoming the first Indian retailer to invest significantly in data mining of transactional and customer data. This initiative helped create multiple insights that drive business growth and profitability of the company. Also, in 2008, the company depoyed a SharePoint based B2B system which provides information interchange with more than 1,500 plus suppliers across business units. The capability of the system has evolved in collaboration with the company's partners and now offers a seamless integration capability for transactional, stock, outstanding data amongst other features. The B2C e-commerce portal of the company is first of a kind SaaS model for the Indian market, which went live in July 2008. Over the last two years, the system has seen a MoM growth of 20 percent and continues to scale new peaks. The intranet is based on Microsoft SharePoint and has evolved over the last few years into a workflow enabled process optimization platform that is used across the enterprise. Apart from enabling various administrative processes, the system acts as a collaboration tool between the stores and the head office.

Proposed IT infrastructure of the company for 2011: As claimed by Gupta, there are no such plans in 2011 for the IT infrastructure. Rather, the company will continue to leverage its highly virtualized storage and server infrastructure, which is now working like a private cloud for the retail operations of the company.

Current system suppliers: Presently, Shoppers Stop has over 1,500 system suppliers which include JDA, Netezza, RAMCO Systems, Oracle and many more. Shoppers Stop's datacenter is outsourced to Sify, who also provides the company with MPLS network connectivity across all its stores and distribution centers. The server infrastructure comprises of highly virtualized Dell Intel servers with VMware running all applications that can be virtualized. Also, the company's outsourced partners include IBM, Syntel, UST Global, SOAIS and Clover amongst others.

Desired qualities in a supplier: The first quality that Shoppers Stop takes into account is the understanding of the company's business and ability to address opportunities arising from new technologies. Apart from this, the only expectation is to be open and truthful about what can be done and what cannot.

Selection of channel partners and their importance: According to Gupta, Shoppers Stop typically works with principles towards creation of solution architecture and review suggestions made by the company as to which channel partners they should be working with. Besides this, Shoppers Stop also looks at the past experience, market reputation and peer recommendations while finalizing its channel partners.

SIKTA SAMANTARAY
(siktas@cybermedia.co.in)