The Hindu Business Line : Tesco to set up captive unit in Bangalore

The company is in the process of implementing US-based Retek's merchandising and advanced retail planning and optimisation solutions to support its global operations, said Mr Philip A. Greenwood, head of IT development and support at Tesco Hindustan Service Centre in Bangalore.

Tesco is in the process of setting up a captive unit in Bangalore from where it plans to carry out software development and business process outsourcing (BPO) operations. It planned to hire close to 350 people for its Bangalore centre in the first year of operations of which close to half of them would be deployed for IT development, Mr Greenwood said.

The Bangalore centre would be the centre of excellence for Retek solutions, he said adding that "Retek skills are relatively scarce and we expect to build them here."

The IT team in Bangalore would co-ordinate with Tesco's core IT team in United Kingdom in implementing and integrating Retek solutions. "We are also planning to build capability here to work along with the vendor to add new functionality to the product," Mr Greenwood said. The Indian IT team would also work on new technologies to forecast seasonal shopping patterns and supply chain merchandising, he added.

As for BPO operations , the Indian centre would be mainly providing the Tier II and Tier III support, which will be basically technology-related queries, he said.

Tesco with revenues of £33 billion has 2,290 stores across 12 countries. The company has employee strength of over three lakh people across the globe.

Despite setting up a captive unit in Bangalore, Tesco intended to continue its existing relationship with Indian vendors such as Infosys, Wipro and Xansa among others, Mr Greenwood said.

The company currently has close to 100 engineers working for it at these companies.

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