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A Credit-able Foray

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DQI Bureau
New Update

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.

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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:

Reduction in response time



Reason: Longer waiting time for customers at payment counters


Vendor/Solution: Hughes/ Satellite broadband solutions

Benefits

  • Improved

    efficiency and customer satisfaction

  • Has

    led to time and cost savings

  • Increased

    stability and availability of the network

  • The

    company recovered its installation cost in mere 100 transactions

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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

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