Pantaloon is one of the largest retailers in
India with 16 stores and 21 hypermarkets (Big Bazaar) and 33 Food Bazaars across
the country. In addition, it also runs a number of shopping malls.
The current IT set up in Pantaloon has a Sify MPLS VPN
network connecting around 20 stores. The last mile is RFID in most cases. On the
application front, the store has a POS (retail back-office) application called
REM (Retail Enterprise Module). An interface has been made between the Plutus
application (for payment gateway) and REM.
Pantaloon has deployed a credit access system that will
offer a superior shopping experience to its customers by reducing the response
time at the credit card counters to only five seconds, in addition to reducing
the scope of error due to manual entry by 99.9%. The new credit access system
runs as an application on a single infrastructure nationally using Hughes's
satellite broadband solutions and HDFC Banks payment gateways. The solution was
rolled out in September 2005.
At a Glance |
Issue: Benefits
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Amit Gupta of Pantaloon explains that the objective of the
credit access system was to bring down the reduction in response time from 15-20
seconds to around five seconds. Importantly savings in cost and faster ROI were
the additional benefits accrued.
The solutions evaluated were from Reliance and Tata Indicom
CDMA. Response time on CDMA was also higher than VSAT although lower than PSTN.
HECL VSAT gave superior performance of good response time, reliable and stable
equipment, and also provided attractive commercial proposal. HDFC Bank too
recommended VSAT as a better technology option than CDMA. However, for locations
having fewer transactions, eg some of the food Bazaars, CDMA was used.
Informs Gupta, “We have deployed the DW7700 VSATs across
all our stores. It takes less than five seconds to complete the entire
transaction.” Other than the DW7700 VSATs, the third party application from
Pinelabs, called Plutus, developed to capture the transactions at the store on
the ECR and the HDFC Bank payment gateway, the Pantaloon network also included
the following equipments. These were the HUGHES Broadband VSATs with Enterprise
100 Bandwidth plan, the HUGHES IP Gateway Server at HECL NOC and the Cisco
Router for NAT and Routing functionality.
This all has improved the efficiency and customer
satisfaction; the credit access system has also led to time and cost savings for
Pantaloon, with the transactions now taking 75% lesser time at a reduced cost.
Another not so visible benefit has been the increased stability and availability
of the network as HECL conducts proactive monitoring and call logging for
Pantaloon's VSATs during the peak business season. The last word rests with
Gupta, “This solution allowed Pantaloon to recover its installation cost in
mere 100 transactions, while we are doing an average of 300-400 transactions per
day.”
Minu Sirsalewala
minuvs@cybermedia.co.in