Indian Retail Technology Observations
I know its been a while since my last post. Unfortunately I was suffering with flu for a week. It was a nasty one which knocked me out for a week. Anyway's, lets get back to the topic on hand.
During my tour of Indian retailers what I found is they have pretty good technology in the store front. The Point-of-Sale systems used for checkout are the latest ones, in fact better than what some of the western retailers still use (green screen). Most of the items are bar coded and there are both flat bed and hand held bar code scanners for scanning items. Each of the POS terminal is equipped with a scale for weighing items. There is a receipt printer and embedded MSR for capturing credit card information.
Most of these POS systems are from well known brands in retail industry and are NOT home grown. What this means is, they already incorporate the best practices learned from years of experience by these POS vendors. This gives a jump start to the Indian Retail industry and puts them on par with the western retailers.
There is however one key difference and it is the absence of self-checkout terminals and self-service kiosks. While the western world is rapidly moving towards self-checkout terminals, Indian market will take sometime to adapt it. Since organized retailing is a new concept Indian consumers will take time to adapt to it and it'll also take time to streamline and simplify the checkout process before introducing self-checkout.
Self-service kiosks also may take sometime before we start seeing them in the stores. One of the main reasons being the cheap labor. It is easy to find cheap labor to help customers and it is one of the reasons you see many sales clerks and other employees on the store floor who are helping customers and stacking shelves constantly.
I didn't get permission to venture into the manager's office or store back office, however based on discussions it was clear that manager had a workstation for managing store inventory, store scheduling, receiving, etc. Also, there is a store server to collect transaction data and to upload/download information from the corporate office. What is unclear to me how real time is the sales data upload to corporate office? This is a secret that retailers do not want to share easily with outsiders. Considering the bad infrastructure of roads and transportation, my guess is stores operate pretty independently.
I'm sure once the infrastructure improves retailers would want to centralize the supply chain and distribution. However until that happens stores may be operating independently.
