BI And E-Commerce To Drive Business At Globus

Globus, a speciality retail chain promoted by Rajan Raheja group recently declared its ambitious plans to expand to 152 stores, across 70 cities by 2011-12. The company has laid down a five year IT plan consisting of systems that need to be implemented to achieve the business goals. Currently, it is in the process of implementing the e-commerce and Business Intelligence initiatives. Meheriar Patel, general manager and head IT, speaks about the latest initiatives .

What leads Globus to e-commerce initiatives?

We are rapidly growing and planning to have a pan India presence, apart from expanding the brand awareness. These are some of the key areas where e-commerce could drive us. Today being available on web is very significant and it also provides an option to customers of having products available online. We started this project four months back and very soon would be launching a fully integrated e-commerce platform.

E-commerce concept has been successfully exploited by airlines and railways for ticketing. However clothes are rather too personalised items and involve issues like fitting, feel and comfort of fabric. Despite these constraints, we wanted to make our self available online, so that till the time we reach 100 stores, e-commerce should bring some business for us. We are using Web 2.0 and have outsourced the entire project to a company called TechShastra.

How much business do you expect to generate through e-commerce?

E-commerce will drive online shopping and enhance the brand recognition. However, I don’t have exact figures to describe the business expected through e-commerce. If it was a complete e-commerce model, then there would have been some expected sales figures. We would like to see the progress of e-commerce initiatives over a period of time. The integration with payment gateways and logistics is already established.

Will it be B2B or B2C or both? What are the benefits of such an initiative?

It is more of B2C right now. B2B initiative will come in over a period of time, where in we will involve our suppliers and vendors. One of the prime benefits of e-commerce would be that our brand will be available online. We would be able to serve our customers across the world, including remote places in India where we currently do not have a presence.

Can you draw your requirements as far as BI implementation is concerned?

Business Intelligence is a prime requirement for reporting and decision making. I wanted users to spend less time in churning out reports from transaction systems. It used to take an entire day in developing reports as users were required to log in at different transaction systems. Hence we required a front end, single window that could talk to all the transactions systems.

We have signed up with Business Objects and iDecisions to build a seamless layer for Business Intelligence. We are almost live with three of our main systems and two more systems will be ready very soon. We run JDA’s merchandising, financial, and POS systems. Apart from these systems, BI will also draw reports from other systems like fabric management and loyalty programme.

The value of implementation is already getting noticed. Some of the departments have taken the initiative to display the contents of BI to other departments.

Did the legacy systems throw any challenges while implementing these solutions?

We don’t have any legacy systems but we do have systems which are not upgraded to current versions. As a part of our five year plan, we will be upgrading many of our systems. The customer loyalty programme will be revamped as CRM and fabric management systems will be revamped with the manufacturing system of JDA. We are in the process of upgradation; however IT personnel can not hold that as an excuse for being inefficient. Some things are such which can not be put on hold for anything else; BI is one of such initiative taken by us.

Can you throw some light on the concept of ‘Retailing at next orbit’? Has Globus planned any initiative on this front?

I think ‘Retailing at next orbit’ is a picture that every retailer will strive to achieve in terms of using the right technology for better customer service. We are planning to use some of the latest technologies in our stores that includes RFID, POS integrated CRM systems, mobile wireless technology and blue tooth. This will enable an interaction to happen not only in stores, but also in the areas close to the store. Drawing huge crowd in the stores is very difficult; such technologies will help in converting the ‘walk-in’ into customers.