Online-offline integrated

Prior to that, in each one of the industry segments, the company initially selected a few customers and worked with them in building the solution itself.  It focused on the creation of the IPR in 2009 and in 2010, and validated the solution with key customers in every industry sector; and in 2011 it started scaling the customer base. Ion-TCS is growing at a rate of 24 per cent annually and has clients like Barista, Brewberrys, The Loot, Nature’s Fresh and Ginger.

CASE STUDY

Oxford Bookstore is 80 years book retailer with offline and online presence. This chain of book retail has its presence in most of the metros and has carved niche for its fine mix of popular books and rare ones in the ambience of a coffee shop.

Requirements

Oxford Bookstore was scouting for better loyalty management as the loyalty programme was limited to redeeming points at stores; it had the goal to reduce shipping time by 50 per cent, and was looking for dynamic store arrangement to promote seasonal topics. The business problems lie in the absence of the loyalty processing  gateway; online store and offline store used different applications connected by day end process; and books database in stores inventory had little information of seasonal and topic trends. The bottom line is that the retailer required a new business mode to integrate offline and online stores.

The solutions provided

While the loyalty points system allows customers to redeem points to buy books, its true potential lies in making points work like currency just as some airliners have done.

TCS rolled out “Gems “- a loyalty points gateway that helped broadened the customer base of Oxford Bookstore in April 2009. Many organisations rewarded employees with Oxford Gems that would then get redeemed with books sold at Oxfordbookstore.com. The online store then would deliver books through supply chain packing and shipping in hours.

Unlike many popular online sellers, Oxford Bookstore’s online channel was built as an extension of its physical stores with a conscious strategy to provide its online customers the same flavour of collection

This meant that the supply chain driving the book stores would be the same as the online shop. The stores inventory manager had to plan the store in a way to ensure that demand from both the channels are met. The TCS SMB Store Inventory Management, designed for multi-channelling, provided a solution for this requirement of Oxford Bookstore.  

Oxford Bookstore could see the benefit. For instance, a book lying on the shelf for several days was one day actually sold online!

The software provides integrated services that takes care of store inventory management, point of sale, warehouse management, online presence, shopping cart with payment gateway and procurement.

To summarise

• IT was availed as business service - Loyalty gateway
• The loyalty solution helped in synergies across many firms
• Retail software was inherently multi-channel
• Supply chain got simple with one piece IT.

TCS is not our implementation partner but our business partner. TCS solution helps us providing a unique integrated online-offline retail solution to our customers.

Subhasish Saha, Chief Technology Officer, Apeejay Surrendra Group    

We see the retail market is coming back with significant technology spend for 2011. Multi-channel is becoming very critical as we hear from customers. There are multiple efforts from retailers to improve the analytics and hence reduce the customer churn. We expect the Indian market should show 4-5 per cent growth rate in 2011.

Venguswamy Ramaswamy, Global Head, Ion-TCS