Tesco delivers with the aid of Enabler Wipro

In only eight months, international grocery giant, Tesco met the challenge of building a new 200 million business and supply chain from scratch to supply 18,500 lines of own-brand clothing to 250 stores in four countries in Central Europe, with an Oracle-based IT infrastructure built by a 60-person Tesco and Enabler Wipro team.

Tesco wanted to move from operational independence in each of its market to central and local collaboration within the new trading company, whilst still enabling each retailer to act locally in each market. Tesco decided to create a new company TICB (Tesco International Clothing Brands) for both Clothing and Hardlines supported by new distribution centres in Slovakia over a footprint totalling 70,000 sq m.

Procurement would be centralised and support local commercial teams under a common supply chain. The UK buying teams would link into international sourcing opportunities. Tesco and its IT teams worked with a variety of partners, including Oracle and Oracle retail partner, Enabler Wipro. Tescos own teams worked with Enabler Wipro, to implement the Oracle Retail Management System, Oracle Financials, a third party Warehouse Management System and integrated with Tescos current store systems.

Business Process development and delivery: Enabler Wipro consultants worked alongside Tesco business process experts to initially plan the project phasing to coincide with the urgent business requirement to get the Purchase Order buying processes up and running almost immediately. Enabler Wipro expertise enabled the implementation of vanilla Oracle Retail processes whilst still meeting challenging business requirements essential to a project with such tight timescales.

Integration and Testing: These were particularly challenging work streams to integrate and test the multiple systems especially in relation to the 3rd party warehouse. A lesson learnt for the subsequent Hardlines project was to ensure the warehouse project team was better integrated.

Tesco is now able to replenish each of its stores every day. Both stock turn and sell through have been accelerated. Direct sourcing has increased from 25 per cent to 75 per cent of clothing volumes and Tesco has been able to rationalise from 1000 to 75 suppliers.