CIOIN

Chinar Deshpande

CIO, Pantaloon Retail

Executive summary

Chinar Deshpande, CIO of Pantaloon Retail, likens new technology adoption in his organization with a celebrated situation in cricket: a new batsman taking guard at the wicket. For one, IT adoption also involves uncertainty. And any inaccurate judgment, poor planning or simply a stroke of bad luck can ail a CIO at the start of his innings, just as it can dismiss a Test batsman.

Deshpande recalls such a moment of truth when he struggled to make the adoption of new technologies a success in his organization. His mission to 'win the game' reached a point where he spent an additional couple of crores to make up for the inaccurate planning and breaking windows and cabins in server rooms to make way for new servers. Deshpande deems these situations as his innings in a Test to harbor the long-term IT vision for his organization.

Shortly after Deshpande joined Pantaloon in May 2004, he began work on two initiatives: first, to bring in people with project and business focus. And second, to abandon the application development projects with local vendors. His team began to evaluate high-end ERP solutions for Pantaloon, when he confronted his second roadblock: the mindset of business people in the organization. "We were not mentally prepared to deal with such a large investment in IT. I had to struggle with the mindset that 'just because this person has come from some MNC, it doesn't mean we should go with whatever he says'," he says.

One of the things the IT team did then was to setup corporate VPN across the organization. Pantaloon partnered with Sify to interconnect all its locations. In effect, "at the end of every day, we had central consolidation of all of our sales reports and data. The very next morning, management could see the performance of every single store and category of merchandize," recalls Deshpande.

After months of deliberations, Deshpande and his team zeroed in on SAP as the ERP solution to be rolled out. At this point, he feels that his innings took an interesting turn. He faced three successive risks associated with the adoption of new technology. The first risk was more of a technological one: whether the decision to opt for certain technology is correct or not. The other problem was: once it is established that the technology a CIO has adopted is good enough, the trained employees start to sell like hotcakes in the job market.

The biggest of the three risks was planning the implementation - and the danger of investment going awfully wrong. Deshpande grappled with this risk the most. Initially, his entire focus was on validity of the solution, and whether it met business needs.

SAP now handles financials for the organization as well. Pantaloon has a large server computing grid for SAP. Over 180 locations are live on SAP, with 2,000-plus users. "We have already generated 50 lakh purchase orders with SAP, and are exclusively paying all our vendors only through SAP interfacing with 167 banks. We now have 32 lakh SKUs across various formats of our retail business and have over five billion article type combinations," he says.

The SAP is completely integrated with point of sales machines. Further, all the sales data generated in a day is uploaded into SAP overnight, automatically updating the inventory movement and financial changes. It is not only able to handle retail functionality such as category management, merchandising management, planning and supply chain, but is also taking care of financials, HR and payroll apart from other transactions of business.

"I am working on the second innings of my IT vision, so to speak - working on Vision 2010. A lot of things such as ERP and BI enterprise portals are already up and running," says Deshpande. His objective is to adopt technologies that will enhance the customer's shopping experience, in-store marketing and customer kiosks.