CXO Speak On The relevance of IT for their business

Continued from page: 1

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Prabir Sengupta, ITC WillsLifestyle

Prabir Sengupta
Vice President, Finance & IT, ITC WillsLifestyle

QRetail is fast emerging as a strong vertical in IT usage. What is the relevance of IT for this segment?
Information Technology is absolutely mission critical for the retail industry, especially 'speciality apparel retail', the business we are in. At one level, it is like a basic operating machine for certain key processes, such as retail billing & customer engagement, and distribution centre operations, where, without IT enablement, given our volumes and complexity, such operations are just not possible. Additionally, IT enables us to plan, monitor, and course-correct our business-and in that sense, our IT platforms and processes are like the 'eyes & ears' of the business.

Prabir Sengupta Vice President, Finance & IT, ITC WillsLifestyle

QA slew of challenges at the retail sector, how does IT combat these?
Challenges are many and huge, but if I were to pick some, they would be--A very distributed and customer facing footprint; A very large number of new SKUs that have to be dealt with every season; Seasons and their overlaps; and finally multiple processes and people.

Our IT systems and processes address all these challenges and help create visibility-a common scoreboard and dashboard for everyone within the business-resulting in superior internal efficiencies and higher order customer satisfaction.

QHow does IT help ensure the strength of your sector? What are your future strategies?
We began our IT enablement journey, about four years ago and today, we believe, we have built capabilities that are amongst the finest in this industry. The RFID initiative is a small, but important cog in our overall IT capability building process, the core, of which, we have, more or less, completed. However, in our endeavour to continuously improve, some of the projects and add-ons that are on the boil at the moment, are further enhancements in the retail, distribution and the CRM areas.

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