Barista Coffee Company: Flavoring with IT

Barista Coffee Company (BCCL), established in February 2000 to
recreate the ambience and experience of the typical Italian neighborhood
Espresso Bars in India, is one of the largest and fastest growing retailer of
fine coffee with 120 outlets in the country. Despite stiff competition Barista
continues to remain the pioneering name amongst Indian café chains.

It was however becoming obvious that to reach its stated goal of
1,200 outlets by 2010, Barista needed a solution that would improve operations
through effective control of processes across the organization. More
importantly, the solution had to integrate information flow between the
Point-of-Sale (POS) system at the stores and the main system at the head office
in Delhi. Barista also realized that real-time data would enable quicker
decision making. The technologically superior system had to be scalable and
flexible to support the company's business expansion plans as well.

In consequence, SAP was chosen as the vendor while TCS was
selected as the SI. Subsequently, TCS implemented SAP IS-Retail mySAP 2004 as
the ERP backbone in BCCL and SAP IS-Retail to support the retail business
processes of the chain.

To support these aggressive expansion plans, Barista deployed
SAP NetWeaver platform with the help of TCS. This ensured a seamless information
flow between TCS' custom developed POS solution across Barista stores and the
SAP ERP system at the head office in New Delhi. This was the first SAP XI
implementation in India on the NetWeaver platform. TCS' SAP specialists
configured specific business scenarios in the POS and SAP system, such that data
transfer would happen automatically between the two systems. The business
warehouse was also integrated with the POS such that real-time data would be
available.

"In a very dynamic retail environment, Barista is now
equipped with latest technology to execute its innovative ideas and strategic
plans through informed and planned decision making," asserts Rajesh
Malhotra, CFO, BCCL. Thanks to the SAP deployment, Barista is now able to manage
store inventory replenishment through innovative in-store approach.

In terms of more concrete benefits the solution helped improve
Barista's financial reconciliation capability and eliminated data entry
duplication thereby facilitating faster decision making. The NetWeaver platform
helped shorten closing cycles, lower the inventory costs thereby leading to
quicker communication between the stores and the head office. Last but not the
least, the IT deployment has improved customer experience at Barista outlets by
getting timely information on stock outages and deploying strategic promotions
within a very short time.

"It is the start of a new phase in Barista history wherein
our operations team working at outlets under limited support from regional and
head office would be made informative within a very short time. The level of
transparency within operations and support systems at HO and RO will
automatically improve manifold," believes Rajesh Rustagi, project manager
& finance controller, BCCL. Thanks to SAP, Barista is now ready to take
anybody head on.

Rajneesh De

rajneeshd@cybermedia.co.in