Colin Lian, director, Industry Solutions Group, South Hub Retail, SAP talks to Biztech2.0 and shares his views on the state of Indian retail.

What’s the single biggest challenge facing Indian retailers today and what’s SAP doing about it?

Retail is a business segment which is currently grappling with its legacy systems and at this point a majority of Indian retailers are concentrating on improving their business processes. The retail boom in the country in the last few years has meant that a lot of retailers have had to revamp and strengthen their operations to compete effectively in the changed market scenario. However, their legacy environments prevent them from scaling up beyond a certain point and prove a hurdle in achieving the desired growth.

As a company, we are concentrating on helping these businesses move from where they are today to where they want to be in the next few years. Using our strong portfolio of products, SAP customers can supplement their various IT needs and grow their businesses. And as they grow they can also avail other even powerful business process improvement tools and solutions from us which will enable them to further improve their operations.

You are relatively new in the Indian retail segment and are competing with several smaller well-established niche players. How has it been so far?

We started addressing the Indian retail segment about three years back and I have to say it’s been a wonderful journey so far. Despite us being new to Indian retailers, customers have shown immense faith in our abilities and as a result we have secured more customer accounts than most of our competitors who’ve been here for much longer than us. In order to understand our position, one only has to take a look at our ever-increasing customer base.

To what do you attribute this success?

Well, the secret to our success lies in our business model. I think to a certain extent it also adds to our competitive advantage. We are present physically; we have resource available locally, people who speak the local language interact with customers and understand their requirements and provide solutions which address their concerns. Also our experience and credibility within the retail space gives us an edge over the competition. We actually deliver fully integrated end-to-end solutions to our customers and that’s where we score.

Do the needs of Indian retailers differ from those of foreign retailers?

Yes and no. Retailers be it here in India or in the US, they all need to grow their business, improve processes and compete effectively in order to survive. The basic elements of the game remain the same everywhere. Everyone needs to bring in process efficiency and needs to optimise processes effectively. However, the business processes when you go down a couple of levels tend to differ from one place to another. For example in the US cost of labour is considerably higher than the cost of labour here in India and so there will be a difference between the applicable business processes.

The advantage that we at SAP have lies in the flexibility with which we can configure such processes to suite local environments. Our ability to localise takes care of customising and creating best suite of solutions which address customer needs across different geographies. Also, we as an organisation have been working with various industries because we don’t really look at retail as an industry solution but more as an avenue for gaining competitive edge.

What about customer segments; where do you see the bulk of the growth coming from?

The mid-market segment for sure. There aren’t that many large players in the country to begin with. It is the mid-market companies that are going to give us the most business because they are the ones who constantly worry about whether they will still be in existence in the coming year or not. They are always keen on improving their processes so as to ensure that they remain in business and compete effectively with others. One of the ways they do this is by equipping themselves with technology which among other things also helps increase the value of the entire organisation. So the majority of the business is expected from this segment.

However, this doesn’t mean that we are not going to cater or explore opportunities on other customer levels. SAP has got solutions that address the needs of all customer segments right from the large enterprises to big retailers to smaller ones.

Rajendra Chaudhary