The Hindu Business Line : Subhiksha working on wireless retail solution

Chennai June 15 Discount retail chain Subhiksha is working on a wireless solution that will aid outlets to manage demand and supply of stock on shelves.

"We are prototyping a solution. By September we should pilot test it in 20-25 outlets in the country," Mr R. Subramaniam, Managing Director of the company, told Business Line.

More stores

Subhiksha has 758 stores across Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Vadodara and Hyderabad and plans to increase this to 1,000 by the end of 2007.

The solution is likely to make available real-time information on price points of various commodities stocked in the store.

It may also be used for real time data capture and coordination between the store and the supply chain.

"We find the wireless space interesting," Mr Subramanium said without disclosing details of the solution.

When asked if the company would look at implementing RFID technology in future, he answered in the negative.

A Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag (a chip) on items makes it possible to locate them physically besides providing information on aspects such as value and dimensions of the product. Research reports have indicated that this would replace the existing barcode tag used on items.

"RFID technology is not cheap and even in the US only selected applications like warehousing use it," he said.

Also, the cost of RFID tags is likely to be higher than the value of most products that Subhiksha retails.

"We do not see RFID tags being used on products worth under Rs 100 for the next 3-4 years," he added.

Strengthening BI

The company is also working on strengthening its business intelligence solution and is developing it in-house.

A separate team is using internal data on price points, stock movement and purchase patterns to build a company-specific solution, Mr Subramanium said.

The company's recent customer loyalty programmes are based on some of this data and it is putting in place solutions that will directly impact the supply chain.

No off-the-shelf biz

When asked why the company was not looking at implementing off-the-shelf business intelligence models, he said "we do not want to implement third party solutions and share our processes, giving them an insight into our end-to-end operations."

Subhiksha is also migrating its existing backend infotech deployments to the SAP platform to make scaling up operations easier.

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