"Scalability Top Priority For Retail CIOs"

With the entry of non-traditional retailers in the Indian retail fray, technology adoption - currently at a nascent stage, is on the rise. Abel Correa, country manager, India, JDA Software, in a chat with Biztech2.0 elaborates on the key points to choose the right retail vendor and technology, stemming from his previous experience as CIO, Piramyd Retail.

What are the challenges unique to a retail CIO?

The biggest challenge that I have faced, in my previous role as CIO, Piramyd Retail, is convincing the management to invest in a retail ERP. Convincing management generally takes time due to the size of the budgets involved.

The second challenge is getting the right people for the project. As a retailer, you need to have people with the right kind of domain expertise to successfully implement a project. As attrition rates are high, it is always a challenge to retain the project team and deliver.

Thus top management buy-in and talent management are the two key challenges.

What were your priorities as a retail CIO?

If you look at the retail environment in India today, most retailers are in a race to open as many stores as possible. Thus scalability is an important priority. This involves the automation of stores, refining the billing process and making sure that the business applications are running 99% of the time. “No failures” was among the top priorities.

Another priority with the back office involved ensuring that you had a very efficient system for the merchandisers to make their buying decisions for the right product, from the right place, at the right price and time.

What are some of the key elements that a Retail CIO needs to consider when evaluating a vendor/technology?

When you consider a retail vendor, the first thing is to determine the vendor’s long-term objectives in the country. India is at quite a nascent stage where technology adoption is concerned. Thus it is imperative to ensure that the technology vendor will be a long-term player in the market.

Next, you need to evaluate if the solution is a good fit for your corporate environment. Further, you need to consider the future road map of the technology platform that the vendor is utilising. A CIO also needs to consider the people necessary to support that technology or the IT environment.

When it comes to the technology itself, a CIO would like to look for a technology that offers an open architecture and can minimise integration troubles. CIOs are looking for a technology that will help them integrate without much difficulty, which typically would be an SOA architecture.