Fujitsu Launches Vendor Collaboration Suite For Retail

Fujitsu, the IT services company, has announced the launch of a Vendor Collaboration Suite, (VCS) for the retail industry. Fujitsu Vendor Collaboration Suite provides a collaborative approach to managing all interactions in a retailer-vendor relationship. The solution uses the capabilities of a unique, robust technology framework combined with retail business features to provide collaboration, visibility, accountability and consistency in interactions between retailers and their vendors. The highly cost effective solution provides flexibility to accommodate present business needs and offers scalability to address future business complexities and demands.

“Fujitsu is committed to leveraging its 30 year global retail expertise at over 500 retailers to bring innovative solutions to the Indian retail sector, said Rajeev Gupta, President, Fujitsu Consulting India. He added, “The best of breed technology framework of the VCS solution, offers retailers lower total cost of Ownership (TCO) and an opportunity to convert capital to operating expenditure in the investment phase.”

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Fujitsu VCS solution addresses the unique nature of retailer-vendor interactions by providing a visual development platform which allows rapid automation and integration of complex business processes and workflows. Retailers have the flexibility to host Fujitsu VCS as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) either on Public clouds or on an On-premise Java platform. Fujitsu VCS can be switched between cloud and on-premise with ‘zero’ impact or change. The retail ready features of the solution combined with a user based pricing model, will lead to retailers realising cost savings as their vendor base and number of business process grow. Retailers who are already using portal ware or Business Process Management (BPM) can look towards extending their future needs through a seamless integration with the Fujitsu VCS solution.

Retailer interactions with its vendor base is evolving significantly over the years from being earlier confined to the purchasing function to now moving towards collaboration in the areas of new product introductions, store sales and stock visibility, shopper marketing and space planning. Retailers have adopted various hues of technology such as portals, ERP extensions and BPM to manage these interactions. These have met with limited successes due to cost implications when processes, organisation structure and IT systems change in a retail organisation.

Fujitsu VCS solution can be used for vendor interactions in the areas of planning, onboarding, purchasing, vendor contract, shopper promotions, payables and store reporting. Fujitsu will also handhold the customer through the collaboration process through a pilot for key vendors and then a rollout to the entire vendor base. Key features of Fujitsu’s VCS solution include a plethora of features such as – retail organisation structure with role based permissions, product category based visibility and execution, audit trails, secure vendor access, ERP integration, SLA based execution, email integration, dashboards etc.