'The most game-changing decision was to outsource our IT functions to an external agency'

Having started off in 2004, William Penn, now a multi-brand retail store chain, was by definition a pen store, something similar to a stationary store. The differentiating USP that Willam Penn followed was a multi-brand retail store chain strategy with premium brands in what they defined as fine-writing instruments, desktop, and lifestyle accessories. And these pens were not the one to be found anywhere easily like Fisher Space, Pelikan, Sheaffer Cartier, Conway Stewart, Cross, Faber Castell, Lamy, Porsche Design, Retro 51, Sailor, St. DuPont, Waterman, and Caran d'Ache. The brainchild of Nikhil T Ranjan, founder & CEO, William Penn, the brand has come to associated with style and luxury. Currently, having a network of 15 stores spread across Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Pune, Ranjan is now targeting up to 20% y-o-y growth targeting to be a `100 crore company by FY15. Under the vision of Ranjan, the company is currently growing at a 15-20% and he intends to continue the momentum. William Penn is targeting up to 25% growth in revenue, with over `56 crore in FY12 compared to `45 crore in FY11. Targeting the #1 position, Ranjan's company, which presently houses 20 premium brands of fine-writing instruments, is planning to increase its portfolio by becoming the numero uno choice for selling luxury-writing instrument brands segment. Over the next 18 months, Ranjan also plans to add on to his network of 15 stores by adding another 4-5 stores. Speaking to Dataquest, Ranjan shares his thoughts on how IT is helping the chain meet its growth demands. Excerpts

In the last 12 months what are the IT implementations that William Penn has invested in with regard to its business needs?

In the last 12 months, we have taken a lot of new initiatives to bring in more efficiency, transparency, and also increase our revenues. These were largely strategic and transformational investment putting a long-term goal. The most game-changing decision was to outsource our IT functions to an external agency/service provider in order to concentrate our focus on our core competency and we also got a consulting CTO.

Deeper into the IT implementations, we implemented a Retail (B2C) CRM Program, which is a cloud based program, using the mobile number as the unique identification. We introduced a store inspection application on the mobile to bring more flexibility. We also introduced CRM for the B2B division. We integrated some of the new applications to our existing retail ERP. We also initiated an upgrade of our website CMS, you might see a few changes soon.

Another significant implementation was the addition of Wooqer, our online learning portal.

Do you believe that the role of IT has changed from bringing internal efficiency to building a competitive advantage? What has been the significance of IT in your business?

At William Penn, we completely agree that IT is about enabling each person across the organizationto be able to do more. IT is also about building a competitive advantage. All the initiatives that William Penn undertakes are well planned and implemented under the capable supervision of a team of IT consultants, with a focus on all aspects of business, including the human resource management, operations, product management, or customer experience. Our latest IT-related implementations and decisions like outsourcing to a third-party service provider and hiring a consultative

CTO have been in sync to our business moves.

What are the business challenges that you face in the retail vertical? What role does technology play in addressing these?

One of the key challenges and needs in our business is the knowledge of who our customer is and how we can best deliver value to this customer. Hence we are looking forward for IT to play the pivotal role in understanding our customers better.

William Penn has implemented the Wooqer platform. Can you tell us about the challenges that the company faced before the implementation as well as the results post the implementation?

Wooqer is a cloud based system that has tools of interaction. It offers subscription to the platform, analytics and support to functions like operations and marketing, and support to customers in the retail businesses. We looked for something that could create audits, appraisals, checklists, data collection sheets, feedback surveys, training, and track the usage and performance. It did take us some time to get started with the platform and discover our own ways of working. The discovery continues till date, as the organization continues to find new uses of the platform.

Some of the immediate benefits included the streamlining of various processes that were already running across the organization, with Wooqer becoming a single point of contact with the entire network and for all operational activities. Training emerged as a large-use case as we found ourselves being able to achieve a lot more with the same set of resources.

Wooqer is more about a philosophy and way of working than just a tool. As a DIY (Do it Yourself) platform, Wooqer enables each individual in an organization to create solutions for their own problems, however small or big, and implement them the way they want. However that requires an ability to think of and create one's own solutions and enough time to be spent on the platform to understand how and what problems it can help solve.

Wooqer has assisted in the democratization of ideas by making sharing of ideas and thoughts more free and open. It has also helped in seeking a majority opinion before implementing the key operational decisions. Hence Wooqer as a platform has been able to address many loopholes.

How smooth or cumbersome was the implementation process?

The implementation per se was very smooth as it was a cloud based system. The challenge usually is at the user level, since the success of the platform depends on the acceptance and adoption by the users. As any retail organization is a distributed one, we had our challenges in training and getting the team to adopt it. Having said that, we will continue to explore more uses of the platform each month.