30 minute interview

Integrated ‘Tesco in a box’

Philip A Greenwood Head of IT Development and Support, Tesco

British retail major Tesco is deploying a new set of applications to solve business integration issues

*Why did Tesco migrate from legacy software to new applications?

Greenwood: Over time, we had developed a set of in-house legacy systems, which had been customised to suit our internal requirements. All these systems have been critical for us as we are in direct touch with suppliers through them and also because they help us analyse market trends. The problem is that we have expanded our operations into Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Turkey, Thailand, Malaysia, China, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. Additionally, these legacy systems have been customised to suit country-specific requirements. These systems are not integrated and it is a complex task to incorporate changes in disparate systems spread across geographies making it difficult for us to share sales performance from a central location. We are now in the process of implementing a set of applications that include retail ERP (Retek), Teradata Data Warehousing Solution, reporting tools from Business Objects, a human resource solution from PeopleSoft and a finance package from Oracle Financials. We want to integrate these new systems and maintain a common database at a central location in the UK. The integration exercise will be known as ‘Tesco in a box’.

*Is the role of the IT team at Tesco’s ‘Hindustan Service Centre’ critical to this effort?

Greenwood: Tesco’s Bangalore IT team will be responsible for rolling out the new applications across our global operations. Once the implementation is completed, the IT team will manage and maintain the new system along with the UK team. We are looking at developing expertise of our Indian IT team in the retail domain and have skilled manpower with expertise in mainframe technology, .NET, Retek and Business Objects applications.

*Do you have an ongoing RFID project?

Greenwood: Over the next few months we are looking at building support capability in the RFID space. We have carried out pilot projects in the RFID space at two of our retail stores in the UK. We have experimented with large pallets used in storing equipment and hope to implement RFID in the near future.

*What role does Tesco’s Hindustan Service Centre play in the company’s global initiatives?

Meena Ganesh (CEO of Tesco’s Hindustan Service Centre): In addition to IT support services, the ‘Hindustan Service Centre’ will also give support in the financial accounting and contact centre space to Tesco. Support will be in the form of e-mail and back-office transaction work. Of the 170 people on our rolls at the Bangalore centre, 80 are for IT services and the rest for contact centre support and financial accounting (back-end). We plan to add 430 people in the next 15 months. The additions will be in IT support as well as call centre and financial accounting.

Abhinav Singh