LifeKen Chooses Oracle Retail

IT today is instrumental in accelerating business and enabling enterprises across verticals perform better. The Indian pharma industry is also leveraging its benefits.

LifeKen, a popular pharmacy retail chain in Bangalore and Chennai, has found tremendous improvement in their day to day business operations after deploying a solution called Oracle Retail, earlier known as Retek.

Need for an integrated solution

LifeKen started its business with computerised stores and with plans to expand their store-spread assertively, the company needed embedded global best practices. With the ability to provide controls essential for a widely distributed business, they also required complete integration from POS to back end and analytics to provide real time information on their business and minimise integration issues during future modifications and upgrades. They were also keen to manage customer transactions and pricing at batch number level to cope up with the regulatory requirements.

Temporary deployment

While carrying out its evaluation, Lifeken shifted temporarily to Softlife, an indigenous pharmacy specific retail software, that allowed it to acquire reasonable HO and centralised control of its masters and pricing. Softlife operated on a .Net platform and was marketed by C-Square Technologies.

More from Biztech

Future Group - Reliance Retail Deal approved by CCI RBI ban on cryptocurrencies takes effect; prohibition could force investors to tap the black market

However, LifeKen soon realised that they needed a more efficient retail specific ERP solution to support their growth. Numerous technology options were considered, including the one-hand integration of stand-alone POS and back end as well as international options.

Oracle Retail - The right choice

After much pondering and evaluation, LifeKen finally chose Oracle Retail. The company found the solution to be user-friendly, thus enabling easy and quick adoption by the store personnel. The business control features comprising Retail Sales and Stock Count were very useful. LifeKen is the first India roll out of this global solution.

Modules including Oracle Retail Merchandising System (ORMS), Oracle Retail Point of Sale (ORPOS), Oracle Retail Store Inventory Manager (ORSIM), Oracle Retail Sales Audit (OReSA), Oracle Retail Invoice Match (OReIM) and Oracle Retail Data Warehouse (ORDW) were deployed by LifeKen.

The solution was customised to meet LifeKen’s India-specific business requirements. The modifications included management of batch number and expiry along with MRP and warehousing options through the merchandising system.

Tata Consultancy Services, Oracle’s Advanced Certified Partner, partnered LifeKen in the technology implementation of the project that went live in March 2007.

Solution supports aggressive expansion plans

A pharma retail chain with approximately 60 stores in Bangalore and Chennai currently, Lifeken is launching its next phase of expansion that will see it grow to approximately 500 stores in two years and around 1000 stores in 5 years.

According to M C Kini, CEO, Lifeken Healthcare, “We want to maintain our expertise and grow fast and steady. We have aggressive expansion plans and thus will continue using IT very effectively. Oracle’s retail solution has helped us operate our business with ease. We track 250,000 items across branches everyday, which would have been impossible without IT support. We have better control over the business and are also able to push down promotions through our stores. The software has geared us up for rapid rollouts on the anvil."