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Follow UsIn the 1920s, the Singhania family took the first step towards creating what
would become a global brand in woollen textiles. The family left the
sun-scorched, feud-ridden village of Singhania in Rajasthan, for more
opportunistic locations. The family became agents for major textile mills in
Kanpur. Eight decades and many generations later, their entrepreneurial spirit
has created a textile brand, ranked among the top three woollen fabric brand in
the world.
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Being in the hall of fame, Raymond continues to use agents as their sole
point of interaction with customers in their distribution supply chain. The
agents are also family run businesses, whose relationship with the textile
company is many generations old. The agents typically have about 250 customers,
who could be either branded manufacturers or retail showrooms or large
distributors. The agents are responsible for generating sales, ensuring that
customer orders reach manufacturing plants, monitoring deliveries to customers,
collecting payments, reconciling accounts and so on. Raymond has no branch
offices anywhere in the country, except for Delhi. Procurement is routed through
the main manufacturing plant at Thane, outside Mumbai.
Stuff to the brim
But with the expansion of business, both from agents within the country, and
from exclusive outlets in India and abroad, the tradition rich practice of using
agents is now under pressure. Explains, Chetan Desai, Raymond’s General
Manager of IT, "Today the customer’s needs are routed through an agent,
which has led to an information gap. In the good old days, customers were
willing to wait, but today if they don’t get their order within 30 days, they
don’t want it," explains Desai. And that can be disastrous for a product
bound to seasons and swings of fashion. Raymond currently has brand extensions
in ready-to-wear garments and in woollen fabrics. Focussing exclusively on male
fashion, the ready-to-wear’s include well known Park Avenue for formal wear;
Parx for business casual looks; and Manzoni in the premium range. In the fabric
range it has the super-premium Chairman’s Collection and Renaissance
Collection, which are blends of wool, cashmere and angora.
The expansion of business has also put pressure on Raymond’s IT department.
Being able to quantify the demands of the fashion conscious male; timely
delivery to retail outlets and garment manufacturers; tracking the sales of
hundreds of stock keeping units; availability of stocks at the 19 warehouses
across the country and three manufacturing plants; have become key information
deliverables for Desai’s department. Also putting the pressure on Desai is the
fact that any technology initiatives taken by the Raymond company are viewed as
prototype for the rest of the JK Group. Desai therefore has to tread carefully
but can’t opt for any easy solutions. He looks at the challenge in a more
wholesome manner and describes it as a step towards becoming more agile and
efficient. In between all these variables and the rapidly metamorphosing
business, Raymond is determined to keep the position of the agent intact.
Tradition holds above all else.
Weaving them to the Web
One of Desai’s challenges was therefore to empower the agent community
with information that could help them and their customers in better decision
making resulting in faster transactions. A recent initiative in this direction
has been to link up Raymond’s back-end applications with a private web portal.
With this facility, agents and customers can log-in to the private web site and
view information related to their business transactions. Customers can view the
status of their orders in terms of delivery date and mode of transportation;
payments outstanding and other debit, credit notifications. Agents can view a
similar status covering all customers in their portfolio and in addition can
view status of stocks at the warehouse and plants. When a customer calls an
agent to place an order, the agent doesn’t need to call up the Thane plant or
the warehouses to check existing inventory. They can now do it online.
So how does it work? Raymond’s back-end central repository is linked to
Mumbai based BconnectB’s web portal. This B2B solution provider has created a
web based private user group for Raymond’s distributor community covering
agents, large customers, retail outlets, warehouses, manufacturing plants and
the head office. Raymond has subscribed to this service from BconnectB on an ASP
rental basis. Raymond’s private web portal is hosted on BconnectB’s IBM
severs running Windows NT, collocated at VSNL’s Prabhadevi data centre. The
three manufacturing plants located at Jalgaon, Chhindwara and Thane and the
warehouses update the centralized back-end repository located at Thane towards
the end of the day. This information is posted at Raymond’s private portal
overnight. User’s logging in the next day view information current to the
previous day and this is sufficient for most operational needs of the
distribution supply chain.
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RaymondIs the position of the agent threatened with this new web-based information
framework? Disagrees Desai. By providing timely information, the company is
servicing the customer and not affecting the role of an agent. The agent still
has to close deals by carrying samples of the latest fabrics with them. In the
garment business, purchase decisions by customers are extremely personalized and
dependent on first-hand experience of the product. And that’s why there will
always be an offline market to support the online one, asserts Desai.
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Bringing the closets close
But creating the virtual world of agents was not a dish-on-platter
experience. With multiple islands of information and databases, the biggest
obstacle for Desai till sometime back was building a centralized repository.
Desai, who claims that he is not an IT professional but somebody from the
business side acting as a catalyst to change, points to the prolonged usage of
IT in the group since 1960 as a reason for the legacy challenge. The biggest
issue facing the business till two years back was to make various applications
covering production, raw materials, sales, despatch and delivery, customer
relations, talk to each other. Adding to the complexity was the fact that they
were distributed across three manufacturing plants and used different hardware
and database platforms. So the easiest way out for Raymond should have been to
put an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) in place! Wrong, it was doomed to fail
from the start.
The business of garments, both ready-to-wear and fabrics, involves stock
keeping in multiple and unrelated units. Fabrics need to be specified in weight,
dimensions, weave, colour and so on. And for ready-made’s it’s equally
complicated with specifications of size, colour, design, quantity, changing
rapidly. Over the years, Raymond’s IT department found that existing ERP
solutions didn’t meet their requirements at all. "So instead of trying to
break our heads fitting an ERP to our needs, we decided to interconnect our
systems," remarks Desai.
Most of the legacy in-house applications were a combination of Sybase RDBMS
and Solaris Unix OS. The user interface was character based and the applications
created static reports of limited benefit to business managers. Building a
centralized repository was therefore considered critical in the integration
process. This took the form of an OLAP datawarehouse, built on Microsoft SQL
Server, running on Windows 2000. With this datawarehouse, called Textile
Integrated Manufacturing Enterprise System, managers can now drag and drop
fields in a graphic interface creating reports to suit all requirements. Data
from all disparate applications are consolidated inside this warehouse and in a
sense Raymond now has its ERP.
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The thrust for Desai has therefore been to port legacy applications on modern
hardware. The JK group has invested in a campus-wide fibre optic network linking
the offices of Raymond Textiles, Raymond Apparel, JK Files and Helene Curtis
located at Thane. Another initiative has been to assign email IDs for all
employees. And rather than diverting funds to purchase licenses for expensive
messaging software, Desai has chosen to deploy 15 Linux e-mail servers
supporting 750 e-mail IDs across the various divisions. "When I am in a
fast mode of development, I would rather spend on key environment and
infrastructure areas," says Desai, explaining the rationale of using open
source OS over Microsoft or Lotus-based messaging platforms.
Spinning ahead
For now Raymond has got its act together. It has integrated various island
applications and built B2B processes across its distribution operations. But
what do the finishing touches look like? Desai continues to worry about the lack
of forecasting capability within the business. "I want to make forecasting
into a science rather than an art", is his current aspiration. One way to
get there is to build a supply chain solution on top of the legacy applications
and Raymond is in advanced stages of discussion with SAP and i2 Technologies.
Optimizing production schedules, reducing delays in delivery and reduction in
order cancellations are benefits of having a good forecasting system in place.
And that promises to be the energy-sapper and story of tomorrow. Perhaps,
yesterday’s king of chess and today’s complete man, may become tomorrow’s
digital highbrow.
Arun Shankar in Mumbai The author is a former executive editor of Dataquest.
He can be reached at aruns_62@yahoo.co.in