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TESCO Hindustan Service Centre, which is the UK retail giant TESCO's 6,300-person strong back-end support centre in Bangalore, is evaluating the establishment of a centre overseas.
Currently, TESCO HSC is the only back-end support centre of its kind for the world's third largest retailer which apparently saves $100 million annually from this outsourcing. “We want an overseas centre which will have multilingual capability to cater to TESCO stores in Europe and elsewhere,” said Mr Sandeep Dhar, CEO of the company.
TESCO HSC is into its eighth year of operations. It handles a large number of functions for the TESCO stores in 13 countries. These services range from finance, supply chain management, project management, architecture and design for the stores, e-commerce online marketing, and content management.
It services TESCO stores in the UK, Slovakia, Czech, Hungary and Turkey as well. Increasingly property related work is also being moved to India.
“Our business strategy translates into applications; we are not a coding centre but an engineering centre,” said Mr Dhar. The development of mobile and tablet applications for “multichannel retail” (using physical stores as well as e-commerce applications) is the company's latest preoccupation. For example, a recipe application has been developed where if a customer is interested in a particular recipe, he or she can order all the ingredients for that recipe. The items will be either delivered to the customer's doorstep or can be picked up from the nearest TESCO store.
(TESCO does not have a retail presence in India as the regulations do not permit multi-brand retail, but it has entered into a joint venture with a Tata group company for the cash-and-carry wholesale business.)
A mobile applications laboratory was created six months ago at TESCO HSC, said Mr Dhar. The company also has retail labs which simulate the store environment, complete with physical tills and the like; here the applications can actually be tested out before being rolled out in the market. Shopping applications across iphone, ipad, android and Microsoft platforms have been designed. Design of green stores for TESCO is also happening at the centre, said Mr Dhar.
As automation progresses, the same work is done with less people, but as more and more work is coming to India, business is expanding, said Mr Dhar.
kripram@thehindu.co.in
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