In order to be a part of the retail boom in India, Aditya Birla Retail Limited has taken the help of IT. The company has deployed Oracle Retail Applications to automate its stores across India. In order to automate its 500 supermarkets and two hyper marts located in Baroda and Mysore the company began the deployment process in December 2007.

Talking about the deployment Sumant Sinha, CEO, Aditya Birla Retail Limited says, "We have decided to go ahead with Oracle solution as it is in a scalable format, could be used across various platforms and it is available in modular formats as well. The implementation process is also very smooth." He further added that in order to keep track of Stock Keeping Units (SKUs), vendors and millions of transactions, it was essential for us to opt for a reliable solution.

Along with the core modules of Oracle Retail Applications, Aditya Birla Retail will also use other Oracle applications such as Oracle Financials, Fusion Middleware and Database. The company is also implementing Point of Sale, Warehouse Management Systems and Billing from other vendors simultaneously and integrating them with Oracle solution.

In the first phase, the company is implementing core modules of the Retail Applications. TCS is the implementation partner of the whole project. Informing about the implementation process, Raghu Kastury, project management officer, Aditya Birla Retail Limited said, "The implementation process has been carried away in a scientific and professional way, keeping an eye on business needs. We have evaluated the solutions from other major vendors like SAP and Microsoft. The evaluation process has been done at two levels including the strategic level and business level."

Aditya Birla Retail is expecting to go live within the coming few months. As the company is quite aggressive on launching new hyper marts and super markets all over India, it is expecting to take more licenses from Oracle.

Mukesh Mathur, director and business head, Oracle Retail India says, "The whole solution has been provided to Aditya Birla Retail on license basis. Though we have already acquired customers in the retail sector but this is the most notable customer in our Indian operations. Though the organised retail sector is very low, in the coming days we are expecting it to grow tremendously."