Retails - Pantaloons: Think Big

Starting Small

While anyone can dream big, only a few brave ones go on to turn those dreams
into a reality. The story of Pantaloons is one such story, of a small dream
turning into a big reality. In the nineties, Pantaloon was just another garment
manufacturer (still is) like so many others. But somewhere down the line the
script changed, driven by Kishore Biyani, the group made a foray into the retail
market in 1997 with the launch of the Pantaloons retail store.

Over the years the scale got bigger and bigger, it now having
around 20 different retail formats in more than 200 locations and an employee
base of 20,000. The company closed last fiscal with revenues of over Rs 2,000
crore.

All this flurry has turned Chinar Deshpande's (Chief, IT) life
topsy-turvy. It isn't as if he is complaining. An MS in Computer Science,
armed with a management degree in business from University of Louisville, he is
ensuring that IT is a catalyst in the growth story.

Deshpande's biggest challenge has been the sheer growth in
terms of size and scale, as Pantaloons (now a part of the Future Group) has been
posting double and at times triple digit growth year on year. Take the case of
its flagship store, Big Bazaar, launched as India's first hypermarket, in the
last few years, the numbers have nearly touched 30 and there is no sign of that
abating.

Good for Goose, not for Gander

In the early days, the systems at Pantaloon were running on a custom built
platform, with Retail Enterprise Manager (REM) as the central application. The
company was also running other standard applications like Tally, etc. But this
infrastructure did not lend itself to the meteoric growth scale envisaged by the
company. That's when Deshpande and his team started evaluating the options at
hand.

After much detailed analysis, Pantaloon zeroed in on SAP. It
deployed all the major SAP solutions, namely, mySAP CRM, mySAP SCM, SAP
NetWeaver, etc. "We are extensively using these applications and have over
3000 users on the system. In the past 15 months that we have gone live on SAP,
we have already crossed 9 million purchase orders in the system and are paying
our vendors through 167 banks integrated in our system," adds Deshpande.

Nearly all the stores are linked through VPN to the data center
using Sify infrastructure and the last mile is wireless. Even the data center is
big. "We have the HP Superdrome the highest class server, it weighs around
2 tons and stands 8 feet tall. We required 20 laborers just to move the machine
into the center," says Deshpande with a touch of pride. The center has 80
other servers running on Unix, Windows platforms.

Going ahead, Deshpande is keenly looking into BI and data
warehousing solutions. Though, the group already has a set of analytics in
place, Deshpande is already thinking about the future. After all, the group
wants to ramp up from 200 locations to 4,000 in the next few years. Deshpande
surely does not have the privilege to rest; as the problem with big is that it
just keeps getting bigger.

Shashwat Chaturvedi

maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in