Brief

SAP’s helping hand for Indian retail

SAP has opened a Centre of Excellence (CoE) for retail. By Kushal Shah.

The Indian retail sector is on a roll. Wal-Mart is coming to India with Bharti and Reliance Fresh is already setting up a retail chain. With so much happening in the Indian retail industry, organised retail chains will have to ensure that their IT infrastructure is up to the mark. Established retailers—Pantaloon, Shoppers’ Stop, Globus, and Fab India—will have to pull up their socks to withstand competition from the entrants. IT will play a major role not only from the operations management perspective but also from the point of view of rolling out innovative schemes and value-additions.

SAP recently rolled out a strategic initiative for the Indian retail industry. It opened a Centre of Excellence (CoE) for retail. This CoE will function from SAP’s Mumbai facility. SAP retail is the third largest business unit in the company with over 3,500 customers across the globe. The unit has over 25 customers in India. Alan Sedghi, President and CEO, SAP Indian Sub-continent opines, “The CoE will demonstrate the strength of SAP’s retail offering. It will provide assistance regarding industry issues and evangelise the use of frontier technologies. It will become a centre of learning for the SAP retail community.”

According to Colin Lian, Director, Business Development - South Hub, Retail - SouthHub Auto ID-APA, SAP Asia, “Retailers need information regarding demand, insights about strategy and analytics.” He also feels that merchandising is just a part of retail, with financial planning also playing a major role.

The CoE will showcase vertical specific scenarios across the spectrum of SAP Retail solution offerings, advising customers on SAP’s IT strategy and roadmap and conducting audits of ongoing SAP Retail implementations. The initiative also includes organising customer events to facilitate knowledge sharing and certifying partner solutions on NetWeaver.

Sun Microsystems is as an infrastructure partner for the CoE. It will provide hardware, networking and data centre management services. Seal Infotech is going to be a channel partner providing dedicated resources to develop and implement demo scenarios and Proof of Concept demos (PoC) for customers. E-Solutions Pvt. Ltd will provide the integrated Point of Sale (POS) application. Some customers of SAP Retail in India are Reliance, Pantaloon, RPG, Godrej and Barista.

Alan Sedghi, President and CEO of SAP Indian Sub-continent addressing the media