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The implementation has helped the retail chain improve the shopping experience while boosting employee and operational efficiencies. By Harshal Kallyanpur
HyperCITY Retail started its Indian operations with its first hypermarket sprawling across a 1,20,000 sq. ft. store at Malad in Mumbai. Since then, it has gone on to become one of the biggest hypermarket chains in the country with a dozen stores across seven cities. The company has a turnover of Rs. 700 crores and is growing 25% year-on-year.
According to Mark Ashman, CEO, HyperCITY Retail India, the hypermarket chain sells over 40,000 products and sees a footfall of close to a million customers every month. Ashman believes that technology has played a key role in driving business and growth at HyperCITY.
The retail company ensured that all necessary IT systems were deployed right from the time of commencement of its first store in India. It had the merchandise management systems, point-of-sale systems and payment gateways in place but these systems weren’t integrated and, therefore, a lot of manual data collection was required resulting in the company having fewer options to enhance the shopping experience.
The company had implemented BI and analytics from SAS and Netezza almost three years back. However, while the POS and backoffice systems could fetch data, the company’s IT setup lacked the integration and automation to apply the analysis made using these tools at the customer end.
Veneeth Purushotaman, Business Head – Technology, HyperCITY Retail India Ltd., commented, “Our stores close at 10 pm but the last customer often leaves the store at 11 pm. It is a painstaking affair for the employees at the cash counters to manually sit and calculate the cash collections and then send it to the backoffice. Furthermore, the lack of a centralized backoffice meant that price changes and promotional campaigns would be set at the backend and then rolled out to stores the following day.”
As a solution to its operational woes, HyperCITY deployed the Oracle Retail solution. Prior to the implementation, its then current retail solution was two tier—POS and backoffice. Oracle Retail features Central Office, a centralized module that draws data from backoffice modules from the stores and collates them into a central repository.
According to Purushotaman, this brought all of HyperCITY’s stores under a single larger network so that price changes or promotional offers could be pushed to stores on the fly rather than waiting a day for them to be reflected in each store’s systems.
The Oracle system now talks to the merchandise management system and the analysis made by understanding customer spending patterns, customer growth, inventory patterns etc. can now be put to use through various promotions and offers.
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Moreover, the centralization of data and systems has allowed the company to achieve a higher degree of automation. Transactional data of up to 45 days is stored at the backoffice, while the rest is moved to a centralized repository.
The retail solution gives HyperCITY the ability to roll out promotions to individual customers or a particular set of customers or even retailers with loyalty programs. Customers can now be given on-the-fly offers such as a shoppers’ discount. With centralization, the company can now track stores and collate information centrally. It can make intelligent decisions on promotion pricing.
Ashman said, “The implementation gives us the ability to look at sales for individual stores and set up specific promotions for specific product SKUs for these stores in order to improve their sales.”
With the solution being hardware-agnostic, the retail organization was able to roll it out across stores on the existing hardware. The company went live with the solution at its store in Thane in October 2011, rolled it out at its Vashi store after another two months and, as of now, it has implemented the solution across all of its stores, finishing the roll out at the Malad store a little before the announcement. The implementation was started in 2010 with the help of Infodart Technologies, a Gold level member of the Oracle Partner Network.
Purushotaman said, “We did not want to be locked down with vendor hardware that only supported proprietary operating systems. The Oracle solution being Java-based is hardware-agnostic and can run on existing as well as new POS devices. The Thane store was the newest, so we started off by deploying the solution at this location and then moved to deploying it at our other stores on existing systems.”
The POS module adds several features such as touchscreen support, access to and integration with other applications for suggestive or cross selling and it supports multiple payment options such as payment gateways, gift coupon vouchers and payment provider integration.
Purushotaman added, “The POS systems have a direct impact on customers who come first and, therefore, employees at the billing counter must be well trained to handle the POS for a smoother checkout experience.”
With attrition being high in the retail sector, the employees manning the checkout counters keep changing. The company needed a system that was easy to learn and use. The new solution is easy to use and offers the ability to train news users in live environments without having an adverse impact on the overall functioning of the system.
The company plans to leverage heavily on the promotional abilities offered by the solution through mobile, e-mail and in-store promotions.
Commenting on the company’s deployment of the solution, Mukesh Mathur, Executive Director & Business Head, Oracle Retail India, said, “HyperCITY has distinguished itself as a leader in using the power of technology to provide an excellent experience to its customers with great product availability, attractive promotions and quick check outs. It is a valuable addition to our list of successful retailers worldwide using Oracle technology.”
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