Open the Store

Tata Consultancy Services (Hyderabad, India) has announced a new retail-specific program, called “New Store Opening,” that it says helps retailers through the rigors of building or remodeling a store.

The program, utilizing Microsoft Office Enterprise Management technologies, provides retailers with customized business process templates and a central, searchable repository for documents, budgets or any content associated with assigned tasks. Tata says the solution also offers many additional benefits, such as benchmarking and giving companies a better understanding to anticipate how long a particular business process should take versus how long it actually takes.

Tata says “New Store Opening” addresses numerous issues and challenges a retailer may face, such as lack of communication and collaboration across project teams, unstructured document repositories, delays with new and remodeled stores and corporate governance and compliance pressures.

“New store openings and remodels are instrumental for revenue growth in the retail industry; but many companies approach the process with a haphazard set of tools and processes, which in most cases fail to account for new requirements brought about by Sarbanes-Oxley and other business provisions,” said Venguswamy Ramaswamy, Tata’s global head, process consulting solutions. “The TCS-Microsoft collaboration has resulted in a solution that empowers retailers with proven, re-usable project and task management tools. We expect that our retail customers will realize a 30 to 40 percent increase in productivity when using this solution.”

“TCS’s solution fills a great need in the retail industry, allowing project managers to course correct in real-time to ensure a successful new store opening,” said Janet Kennedy, managing director for Microsoft Corp.’s retail & hospitality industry solutions unit. “TCS’s solution is a great testament to the power of Microsoft’s collaborative technologies, and we’re very excited to begin demonstrating this solution to the retail industry.”