Trent Limited, a fast-growing player in India’s retail industry, owns and runs enormous retail brands, including Westside, Star Bazaar, and Landmark, among others. The company has reported that its revenue from operations for the quarter ending December 31, 2021, was Rs 1,499.08 crore — a significant increase over the previous year’s figure of Rs 853.63 crore during the same period. Trent Limited is on track to have over 425 fashion stores by March 2022, according to the company’s projections. Meanwhile, its Star Bazaar food business, which has tight footprint outlets and competitive pricing, is gradually becoming a model that is gaining customer momentum.

To keep up with the rapid expansion and to reinforce its commitment to generating business value through innovative collaborations, Trent Limited recognised the power of cloud-based IT solutions to modernise its operations. The company’s systems previously had issues in maintaining a huge number of concurrent users and a high volume of stock movements since they were functioning on an ageing IT infrastructure. 

With this, Trent Limited selected Tata Consultancy Services to be its growth and transformation partner. For more than two decades, the IT services, consulting, and business solutions provider has worked with SAP to assist customers in transforming into future-ready, intelligent enterprises through the use of a comprehensive range of solutions and SAP specialists.

Trent Limited Head of IT Vinod Kapote said that the SAP S/4HANA implementation project was done using SAP Integrated Delivery Framework to mitigate delivery risks and optimise resources — resulting in a 60{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} reduction in the business downtime window. Kapote further explained:

“Migrating to SAP S/4HANA with SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud maximized the reliability of our IT systems and puts us on a path toward advancing our digital transformation. Our growth and transformation partner TCS, along with SAP Integrated Delivery Framework and SAP ActiveAttention services, helped successfully deliver this transformation program on time and on budget.”

Partnering with Tata Consultancy Services to Move to S/4HANA with SAP HEC

Commenting on the project, Sanjay Das, SAP Delivery Head of IS Retail at Tata Consultancy Services Limited, noted that the firm delivered the program on budget and as scheduled by making use of the effective partnership with SAP using SAP Integrated Delivery Framework. The solution intends to meet customer requirements by integrating both SAP’s and the partner’s solutions and services. It fosters trust to help guarantee that the relationship between SAP Services and Support and the respective partner stays on track. 

Moreover, SAP Integrated Delivery Framework aims to draw on the expertise of SAP and the delivery partner at crucial stages during the project, from the initial engagement through go-live, with clearly defined roles and responsibilities for each party involved. In 2021, the German tech giant expanded the framework to include support for any SAP implementation environment, including the Business Transformation as a Service (BTaaS) offering RISE with SAP, cloud, on-premise, or line-of-business solutions.

Following implementation, Trent Limited was able to achieve the following business value-driven outcomes:

• Reduced the downtime period by 60{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} by adopting SAP’s future-ready business applications. 
• Enhanced performance in business systems and customised SAP Fiori apps for retail operations. 
• Increased the number of concurrent users while at the same time, minimising the processing time for dispatch. 

Other key features of the collaboration project include expert advisory using SAP ActiveAttention, deployment of S/4HANA and Fiori apps, as well as significantly lowering the conversion time of legacy systems to SAP HEC.

“This project is now a model for us and will help us promote this framework to customers in India and the global market,” Das revealed.

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Driving a fast-paced growth, ANTA Group’s revenue in 2020 climbed 4.7{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} year-on-year to 35.51 billion yuan ($5.43 billion), while operating profits increased 5.3{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} to 9.15 billion yuan. The company’s efforts to focus on digital strategy and direct-to-consumer (DTC) initiatives, according to Group President Zheng Jie, contributed significantly to last year’s strong fiscal report.

To stay ahead of the trend, the company launched a massive digital transformation program that spanned all of its operations in China. Additionally, to support the new way of working, ANTA Group first looked for a company-wide enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform.

ANTA Group chose SAP S/4HANA to establish its integrated operations after a thorough evaluation of a variety of leading ERP systems. SAP S/4HANA, which is powered by cutting-edge in-memory technology, aims to enable businesses to quickly produce highly complex forecasts and easily disseminate insights across the value chain.

SAP has a strong presence in the fashion retail market, giving customers the platform and solutions that will help meet their industry-specific workflow requirements. Just last month, Descente, one of ANTA Group’s high-profile global brands, also deployed several SAP cloud offerings to strengthen its DTC business, driving a renewal of core systems by leveraging SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

With the help of implementation partner IBM, SAP assisted ANTA Group in migrating from its legacy applications to SAP S/4HANA. Chen Dong Hai, Senior Director of IT at ANTA Group, said:

“SAP S/4HANA is truly a next-generation digital platform, and offered all the advanced analytics capabilities we were looking for to support our fast-growing business.”

ANTA Group Implements SAP S/4HANA Through IBM and SAP’s Collaboration

ANTA Group and IBM analysed existing workflows and planned out improvements required to achieve the company’s goal through a series of IBM Design Thinking sessions. The IBM team worked with ANTA Group in accelerating the migration process by combining on-site consultations with pre-packaged implementation templates.

Moreover, the SAP Integrated Delivery Framework greatly contributed to the successful collaboration throughout the project by connecting delivery roles, processes, and services — resulting in a low-risk, cost-effective and on-time deployment.

According to SAP, the adoption of SAP Integrated Delivery Framework has seen a huge increase since 2019. With over 70{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} growth and hundreds of projects in the first year since its launch, the framework will soon supply close to half of SAP’s premium engagement services, making it key to SAP’s partner collaboration mode.

“SAP Integrated Delivery Framework as part of SAP Value Assurance provided clearly defined roles and responsibilities that allowed our company, IBM, and SAP to efficiently collaborate and ensure a successful go-live of SAP S/4HANA.” Chen Dong Hai emphasised.

Enabling Growth and Improving Business Processes

Since the implementation of SAP S/4HANA, ANTA Group reaped the benefits of a secure move to a new ERP solution that could enable growth and improve business processes. The key results of the project are as follows:

• Gained a single, accurate view of the performance of all its brands, channels, suppliers, and profit centers.
• Obtained insights into emerging retail trends more quickly by consolidating the monitoring and management of group-wide key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Performed more frequent and granular analytics along dimensions such as inventory consumption and product category by accelerating its merchandising process.
• Transformed its ability to detect and interpret changes in consumer demands. 
• Automatically schedule and optimise its financial, manufacturing, logistics, and supply chain processes by improving the flow of information across the value chain.
•  Enhanced some critical functionalities in the material requirements planning (MRP) calculation mechanism to fully meet new business requirements.

“By using our SAP S/4HANA deployment as a template, we are confident that we will accelerate our growth in international markets, and we plan to continue our close collaboration with IBM Services as we continue on that journey,” Chen Dong Hai concluded.

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