Age Of Strategic Relationships Of Retailers With IT Partners Is Here

Indian retail is booming, and retailers are now looking to form strategic partnerships with their IT vendors in order to achieve long lasting benefits.

According to Siva Rangaswamy, associate VP and head-retail industry, Zensar Technologies, “The age of strategic relationships of retailers with IT partners is already here.” Rangaswamy discussed the same at the recently held ReTechCOn, retail technology conclave.

Retail-based CIOs are now forming strategic alliances with their technology vendors, in order to reap benefits such as Quality of Service, Cost Arbritrge and Domain expertise to name a few. Cost is not much of a factor anymore, added Rangaswamy.

Rangaswamy elaborated that keeping a few important things such as customer centricity, demand management, agile supply chain, multi channel retailing, and IT simplification in mind, retailers could push retail even further.

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Partnerships according to Rangaswamy can fall into three broad categories, depending on the kind of service required: Service Provider model, Collaborative model, Real strategic partnership model. Rangaswamy detailed each of these models:

Service Provider Model: Is particularly useful in order to achieve functions such as cost reduction, where a non-critical process could be outsourced to service provider.
Collaborative Model: Is particularly useful in order to achieve process efficiency, capability enhancements. These models are useful for business lead technology initiatives such as ERP implementations.
Real Strategic Partnership Model: Is particularly useful to achieve business efficiency. These kind of partnerships affect the bottom line and domain expertise in this case is critical.

Rangaswamy also mentioned that if the retailer is just starting out, the IT partners need to help the retailer with basic operations so that the operations can go live. However, in a scenario where the retailer has already gained maturity in the market, IT partner needs to use technological advantage in order to help the retailer improve on competitive factors such as increasing market share.

Finally, Rangaswamy briefed on some points retaliers should consider while entering into partnerships with vendors. Some of these include nurturing long term relationships, focusing on quality of the people involved in the process, and ensuring that the whole process is not handed over to the vendor.