By Nicholas Greene
India’s Bharti Retail Limited has chosen Accenture as its partner for a major SAP implementation, designed to increase efficiency and track the flow of both data and merchandise through the supply chain of its 212 stores that span 11 Indian states.
Bharti Retail will use SAP ERP and data management solutions to streamline merchandising, forecasting, promotion management and customer fulfillment, while also staying ahead of retail trends and finding as many interaction points with its vast customer base as possible.
Bharti Retail has also selected SAP analytics, planning and financial solutions, which it hopes will improve the speed of reporting through its business structure, providing actionable business insights and laying a foundation for better decision-making.
Bharti Retail is a network of neighbourhood stores and compact hypermarkets, largely selling the Easyday brand of household merchandise, which is produced by American giant Walmart.
“The retail industry today is facing challenges of poor consumer sentiments, supply chain inefficiencies and rising costs,” said Raj Jain, managing director and CEO, Bharti Retail Limited.
“We believe that Accenture’s systems integration capabilities and deep retail industry knowledge, combined with its unrivalled understanding and experience in implementing SAP solutions, will help us simplify and strengthen the efficiency of our business operations and support our efforts to rapidly scale up our business.”
On the project, Avinash Vashistha, chairman and managing director for Accenture India, said, “Retailers need to create better business insights and become more dynamic and agile in order to compete as a high-performance organisation. Using advanced analytics and implementing a central planning platform will provide Bharti Retail the insights, flexibility and transparency it needs in its IT operations and supply chain, thereby helping the company to streamline its operations expenditure and improve its profitability.”
