Information technology integrates the entire operations of the retail
initiative at ITC from 'fiber to fashion'. But they needed one solution that
would be able to handle complexity of the apparels' retail land- scape, be able
to parallely process information, in a heavily interdependent environment.
Therefore, they decided to go for deploy- ment of an enterprise-wide solution
that is nimble and also must be able to anticipate more often than to
simply react. The solution should be able to handle a variety of segments,
variety of fashion lines, clothings for both sexes, for all seasons, for all
occasions, product segmentations, etc. The solution should be intelligent enough
to understand the needs of business. The software must be able to generate and
handle an inordinate large number of SKUs. It should also cover distribution
through company-owned retail outlets. To handle such vast complexity, the
solution should provide nearly 100% uptime of IT systems-connectivity,
replication routines etc.
All these challenges called for the conceptualization of 'Project One', a
suite of IT solution consisting of multiple software systems including a core
ERP for transaction processing, BI Solution covering dynamic reporting and
business decision support, POS solution, Smart Card based loyalty solution for
consumer delight, various planning tools and KPI based SMART engine to
facilitate employees to carry out their tasks. The solution has been designed to
eliminate key bottlenecks and offer new features appropriate to apparel and
retailing. It is running on state of the art data centers on highly secure and
reliable platforms across stores and warehouses spread across the country, in a
distributed computing environment.
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Prabir Sengupta, VP Finance & IT, LBRD |
This has enabled Stock visibility across supply chain from vendor to shelf;
optimize inventory levels for savings on interest cost and improved ROI,
efficient inventory management and control; allow for better handling of
customer returns, order tracking and loyalty points management, etc. The
solution uses predator and Movex (core transaction processing system) for
information management. IBM i-Series server is used for Movex ERP while
Microsoft platform was chosen for other applications. All the Web Servers, PAS
server, AD Server & BPW server are based on MS Windows 2003. DB2 is the database
for Movex while MS SQL Servers are used for rest of the application.