While the economic downturn affected almost all verticals, the
FMCG & Retail verticals continued to see significant growth in
India, thanks to increased consumer spending. According to a report
by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry
(FICCI) the country’s FMCG sector has continued to grow at 10
to 12 percent.
Organizations in this sector are required to respond to the
dynamically changing market conditions, better understand customer
demands, buying patterns, make better informed decisions and also
provide a better customer experience to measure up against the
competition. These organizations are also expected to have a
secure, dynamically scalable infrastructure to efficiently address
the ever-changing business demands.
|
Figure 1: IT Budget Outlook by CIOs from the FMCG &
Retail sectors
|
 |
The FMCG sector deploys enterprise applications to consolidate
data and to understand trends in the market and customer demands.
With operations spanning the entire country, organizations in this
sector need to cull information from various sources. Consolidating
this information helps to monitor the efficiency levels and
inventory movements of a particular company, and also brings
greater visibility across its supply chain. This also helps in
planning and forecasting future requirements more efficiently.
So ERP, CRM and BI tools would be a natural choice for FMCG and
Retail companies. The other areas of interest are security and
virtualization.
Top Trends
The findings of the Infrastructure Agenda 2010 survey indicate that
most organizations in both sectors would either spend the same
amount on IT as they did in 2009 or see a substantial increase of
40 percent or more in 2010.
|
Figure 2: Technologies which companies will
invest in to save operational costs using IT
|
 |
This trend is further substantiated by the fact that 80 percent of
the respondents were of the view that investments in BI
technologies would continue to grow in 2010. While 85 percent of
the respondents expect increased investments in ERP, CRM and other
enterprise applications, 75 percent of the respondents see further
investments in the areas of virtualization. 80 percent believe that
security will see increased spending in 2010. However a mere 20
percent expect increased investments in Web 2.0-based tools.
While organizations in these sectors can be expected to further
invest in IT, their focus would be to invest in technologies which
would drive business growth at reduced acquisition, ownership and
operating costs.
Of all the survey respondents, 65 percent expect virtualization and
server consolidation technologies to be a key focus area of
investment from the point of view of reducing operational costs by
using IT. However, only 20 percent of the survey respondents
believe that their organizations would invest further in the cloud
computing model. The cautious approach to adopting a cloud-based
delivery model can be attributed to lower maturity levels and
concerns associated with deploying this model.
|
Figure 3: Top challenges faced by CIOs /
CTOs
|
 |
While a good 60 percent see an increased investment in video and
unified communications solutions, 40 percent expect further
investments in energy-saving technologies to reduce the cost of
overall energy consumption.
Among the top challenges faced as an IT head of an organization, 60
percent of the respondents in both sectors viewed the lack of
budgets to be the biggest hurdle. While 40 percent felt that the
availability of skilled IT manpower was a major issue, only 20
percent felt the need to integrate disparate systems and
applications to be a major challenge.
Going forward, as the competition among retailers accelerates,
profit margins will become thinner. BI and analytics will play a
key role, as retailers will look at stocking products that have
better chance of conversion into a sale. The same technologies will
also be used to better understand the profiles and buying patterns
of different customers in different regions.
Retailers will also look at implementing technologies that enhance
the customer experience (for example, self-service kiosks).
In summary, 2010 will see CIOs from this sector taking IT
initiatives that clearly help the business drive market
share—rather than just supporting the business.
|
Meheriar
Patel
CIO, GM and Head IT, HR & Admin ,
Globus Stores
Key challenges for my company in 2010 include:
Cloud computing, security, point of sale and CRM on a uniform
platform. We’d also be looking at SaaS as a model and its
acceptability.
Key 2010 IT initiatives include:
In 2010 we will be replacing legacy systems and
integrating different application environments. We’ll be
taking collaboration to the next level. We’ll also be making
electronic documents available online.
|
|
Arun Gupta
Group CTO and Customer Care Associate,
Shoppers Stop
Key challenges for my company in 2010 include:
Our biggest challenge for the coming year is talent retention with
the upturn in business while managing profitable growth. We also
want to increase the wallet share of the customer while addressing
a larger portion of the buy basket. Sustained cost management will
also be a challenge, as the economy improves. We also want to
manage internal customer expectations on deliverables from IT. And
lastly, we have to look at continuous innovation for sustaining the
competitive advantage created by IT.
Key 2010 IT initiatives include:
- Institutionalize and improve
on actionable insights driven by enriched information
- Upgrade transactional
systems to sustain long term growth agenda
- Introduce new
customer-facing technologies that will enhance the customer
experience
thereby driving incremental growth from the same customer
- Create a shared service
model for support services that can be adopted by other functions
too
|
|
Basant Kumar
Chaturvedi
Senior Manager - IT, Perfetti Van
Melle India
Key challenges for my company in 2010 include:
The most important thing for us, and our key challenge, is
establishing business continuity for the environment to ensure
uptime and to conduct business even when there is a disaster. We
also want to provide information in an intelligent form to enable
management to make a quick decision.
Key 2010 IT initiatives include:
- Establishing a Business
Continuity site at another location for mission-critical
applications
- Implementation of BI
applications and the usage of collaboration tools and workflows to
share information
- Extending applications from
smart phones to normal mobile phones
|
|
Upal Chakraborty
CIO, DLF
Key challenges for my company in 2010 include:
As the business emerges from the downturn, there is a need to keep
costs under control. Key priorities remain both reductions in IT
costs as well as enabling cost-effective business models . Our
priorities comprise gaining customer insights and online
interactivity with customers. Project management needs to be made
more responsive in order to acquire visibility into timelines and
costs of projects.
Key 2010 IT initiatives include:
- Workflows integrated with ERP across the organization for bill
payments, approvals etc
- Implementation of IRM and Security Policies for data
security
- Virtualization of servers and desktops to decrease costs and
increase manageability
- Enhance BI to provide meaningful management information
systems
- CRM to enhance interactivity with customers and gain meaningful
insights into customer profiles and behavior
- Workflow for compliance approval and storage of critical
documents in a robust repository at the back end
|
|
Veneeth Purushotaman
Head - Technology, HyperCity Retail
India
Key challenges for my company in 2010 include:
- To continue supporting the business through uncertain times by
controlling cost and optimizing on processes to bring in
efficiency
- Completing business-critical and customer-facing projects on
time
Key 2010 IT initiatives include:
- Upgrading Point of Sale systems to sustain our long term growth
agenda
- Introduce new customer facing technologies that will enhance
customer experience within the store and drive additional revenue
by way of incremental wallet share of the customer
- We will also take initiatives that help us drive customer
loyalty by using analytics to better understand the customer
profile and buying behavior
|