Indian retail has to get IT right
With the massive increase in organised retail in India there is going to be an analogous increase in volumes. Handling such great volumes is going to be a tough task, and this is where Information Technology will become the backbone of the sector. As far as choices are concerned, there are various ‘retail solutions’ provided by different IT companies. The most popular are Retail Enterprise Resource MAnagement and Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
Retail Enterprise Management is a form of ERP and primarily provides an integrated solution for the planning, forecasting, mjerchandising, inventury and distribution requirements of retailers, while Customer Relationship Management takes care of relationships with customers, including the recording, storage and analysis of customer information. Newer solutions include wireless handheld devices for inventory management, paying through mobile phones, retail web portals and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), which is an automatic identification method that replaces the barcode system presently used by the retailers.
Recently, many retail solutions have been developed by international companies like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, HCL and even Indian companies like Dynamic Vertical Solutions (DVS), Wipro, Tata Infotech. Software packages like LS Retail by DVS, SAP’s reail solutions, Navision, and Essents are to name a few present. These can be effectively tackled through the implementation of technology in a structured and suitable manner.
The only problem is that Indian retail is still far behind in Information Technology terms. Atanu Ghosh, CTO, DVS explains that the The problem with Indian retailers was that they still look upon Information Technology as a cost rather than an investment.
However, customised software has many limitations which get exposed over time as the tasks become complex and scale of operations increase.
