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With a 23-year career graph spanning diverse sectors such as Pharmaceuticals, Telecom, Logistics, Merchant Banking, Asset Management and Shipping, Arun O Gupta is currently the Customer Care Associate and Group Chief Technology Officer of retail giant Shoppers Stop. Gupta shares some insights into the organization’s IT deployments and the current trends in the retail sector with Harshal Kallyanpur, Correspondent, Network Computing.
 Q. What are the current market trends in the retail industry? How are they affecting IT deployments?
A. New store openings are under pressure and same store growth is beginning to slow down. The retailers are thus cautious and moving with an expectation that the upcoming festive season will result in uplift of sales. With increased costs contributed to by power, transportation and rentals and new taxes, organizations are reviewing their operational costs seriously. For us at Shoppers Stop, we continue our investments in long-term projects while keeping an eye on current operational costs.
Q. What are the current IT deployments in your organization? Can you share some applications or solutions that are uniquely designed for your organization?
A. We currently use the JDA suite of retail solutions spanning the following activities: Planning, Merchandising, Replenishment, Point of Sale, Store layouts etc. Complimenting these solutions are Oracle Financials and PeopleSoft HRM solutions. We also use BPM tools and collaboration solutions deployed on Microsoft SharePoint.
Q. What kind of technology challenges are you facing currently? What technologies are you looking to adopt to overcome these challenges?
A. The challenges have been around evaluation and adoption of new emerging technologies and how they can positively impact our customers and employees. We continue to explore opportunities in SOA, RFID and mobile technologies. We are exploring mobile technology solutions for picking warehouse from companies such as Metrologic. These devices would automate the pick list process where in the picker can perform the goods picking operations from a hand-held device instead of manually going through a printed list. We are looking at a Proof of Concept (PoC) from NC 50 and the initial results have been good. These technologies should create significant impact for retailers.
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