Bond with innovation

Tesco’s Hindustan Service Centre (HSC) is currently the only shared services centre of its kind for Tesco worldwide. The centre, located in Bangalore, provides strategic initiatives for its retail stores across the globe and manages a large portion of the backend functions. Sandeep Dhar, CEO, Tesco HSC elaborates.

 

THE VISION BEHIND TESCO HSC: WHY INDIA?

The idea of starting the centre stemmed from the vision to have a centralised approach to services which will help us (Tesco) achieve efficiency, implement best practices and generate innovative solutions. Today, Tesco operates in 14 countries and has more than 5,300 stores and 4,92,000 employees. 

 

Tesco HSC today employs more than 6,000 staff and employs a varied talent pool including IT engineers, architects, accountants, and many more. 

 

The goal was to optimise a lot of the work that was not customer-facing in a centralised location. For achieving the same, the centre needed to be in a location which had a good mix of talent pool (both technical and others) and also the English language capability as most of the knowledge transfer would be from UK – both the features India actually boasts of.

 

ITS CONTRIBUTION 

Bangalore, India, has so far proved to be a fantastic location with a good availability of a highly skilled workforce across varied disciplines. In terms of advantage of human resources in India, it remains our highly skilled workforce across domains and our language proficiency, that’s in English.  Our industry has definitely moved ahead from the cost arbitrage play, and today it is more about value addition and innovation driving the India advantage. 

 

However, the high concentration of companies in the city also means that there is always a vibrant market for talent and there is a lot of competition to attract the right staff. The Tesco brand itself, however, has been a good element for attracting talent as our centre offers the unique opportunity to gain experience in the retail sector. For people who would like to specialise in retail technology and operations, Tesco HSC is an employer of choice.

 

Tesco HSC has grown in terms of not only people but the number of processes that it has taken over, the areas of work and the complex work it handles. We are also leading the path for innovation in many ways – right from finding solution to improving our customer experience in stores to developing the mobile e-commerce applications. 

 

To enable the customer to shop using mobile, Tesco launched mobile grocery applications on both the Android and the iPhone – the two ubiquitous operating systems of today’s smartphones.  A couple of really interesting and user friendly features provided by this application are barcode scanning support and voice search. The Android application was developed completely by the Tesco HSC Mobile Engineering team. On the iPhone too, the Tesco HSC team has been involved in all feature releases after the initial release. Since mobile is certainly a very important channel for shopping as the trend shows, developing and releasing these apps from HSC is an important step in our mobile strategy.

 

BLENDING COST ADVANTAGE AND QUALITY SERVICES

So, one of the things that Tesco was very clear from the beginning was that the focus was on standardisation and innovation. It was never about ‘cost advantage’. For Tesco, saving money turns out to be ‘a happy consequence’ of improved performance.

 

Tesco employs close to five lakh employees across the globe and a few thousands in India will not make a case for cost arbitrage. Having said that yes, by improving performance and leveraging scale to support multiple countries, we do help Tesco with cost efficiency. 

 

TECHNOLOGY DEMANDS REMAIN THE SAME

Technology-wise, I don’t think there is a difference in expectation from a developing or a developed country. Today, the telecom penetration in India is among the highest in the world. It just goes to show that technology adoption in developing countries could be even faster. Since infrastructure could be a stumbling block in some of the developing countries, it can only lead to more innovative use of technology. 

 

Tesco is now rolling out online shopping in the other countries (earlier it was only in UK) where it has stores; this goes to show that technology in fact can be a differentiator. In South Korea, Tesco rolled out a new offering on ‘Shop as you Go’ which is just another example, where technology is concerned, the paradigm of developing and developed could be non-existing.  

 

THE ROLE IT PLAYS FOR FINANCE SEGMENT

From technology to business and financial processes‚ Tesco HSC powers Tesco’s retail business globally. Tesco owns Tesco Bank, a trading name of Tesco Personal Finance plc, a telephone and internet based commercial bank in the United Kingdom. Tesco Bank provides various financial schemes, insurances, loans and other such services.

Tesco HSC supports various activities in the finance and accounting area for the group right from transaction based processes to statutory financial reporting.  We manage a huge chunk of the payroll work. Building and maintaining financial software that pays suppliers and vendors worldwide is handled out of here. 

 

GROWTH STORY OF E-RETAIL

Our online businesses, including online grocery and Tesco Direct, had another strong year. Taking into account our operations in South Korea and Ireland, total sales grew by 15 per cent. Our UK operations continued to grow well, with double-digit growth in grocery and a further 30 per cent increase at Tesco Direct.

 

Tesco.com is one of the top five most visited retail websites and on an average processes over 500,000 orders a week across its online businesses. Since its creation, the website has had a history of profitable growth and customer take up of online retail has continued to grow. 

 

CONVERGED SHOPPING EXPERIENCE

Today the entire shopping experience is a converged one. One can browse on the internet, scan a product using the mobile, place an order and collect the delivery from the store. 

 

Hence, we try not look at e-retail as a separate piece of business. Definitely the ‘e’ part of the shopping involvement is increasing today. For example, in UK, today three in 10 adults own a smartphone and 5 per cent-a tablet computer. So, these are additional ways of shopping for them along with the brick and mortar stores.