CIOIN

Amit Mukherjee

Head Supply Chain, Spencer's and CIO RPG Group

“The result of our work is a leaner, better-informed and better-equipped management and operations team.”

Executive summary

CIO 100 Winner: The CIO of the retail chain thought of an ingenious way to pull together a company that had just been through a merger and wanted to expand quickly - in the face of significant constraints.

Spencer's Retail was formed when the RPG Group and Dairy Farm International (JV partners in Foodworld Supermarkets) decided to part ways. As a result 48 Foodworld stores and other Music World stores were merged with RPG's hypermarket format. On the backend, the merger created chaos: different businesses had different IT systems and multiple article masters with different merchandise hierarchies. These made it next to impossible for executives to get a handle on the business, conduct accounting, and create consolidated reports - leave alone opening new stores.

"The legacy systems worked on a distributed architecture. This was not conducive to a centralized organizational structure. Neither could they handle the exponential growth the company planned for," says Amit Mukherjee, head supply chain, Spencer's and CIO, RPG Group.

What the merged entity needed was an integrated IT solution that would standardize processes, automate routine activities, and increase visibility. After sifting through various possibilities, Mukherjee and his team settled on a battery of technologies led by their ERP 's retail solution.

But even that choice had problems: an ERP is only good when you have established processes. Spencer's Retail was a fledgling organization characterized by rapidly evolving processes. And "between the business blueprint and the first rollout, many business process owners - and most of the module leads - left," remembers Mukherjee.

In the meanwhile business wasn't allowing any of these problems to slow it down as it rolled out more than a store a day. As he got pulled in both directions, Mukherjee's first aim was to create a team. He got 15 project trainees who became integral members of the core team and six management trainees. With a team behind him, he resolved to control the situation instead of letting it control him. "It was decided that all new regions would use the new solution, but new stores in existing regions would stick to legacy," says Mukherjee. He then focused on building a common article master.

It took plenty of work but today the group has standardized processes, information is readily available, and financial reports come in three days instead of eight. "The result is a leaner, better-informed and better-equipped management and operations team," says Mukherjee.