Retail group Edcon is making substantial near-term investments in IT, says CIO Henri Slabbert.
He says the company is looking for technology that "will give us flexibility".
"The 'big thing' in Edcon is to reinvest in our stores. We've neglected them for many years because the point of sale technology was good, it did not cost a lot of money and was stable."
Slabbert says the move will increase productivity, allow better customer service in-store and "take a lot of manual processes out of our back-office".
With over 1 000 stores across the organisation's various brands, Slabbert is also keen to address business intelligence (BI).
"We need to give access to our store managers. You can't walk through a store anymore to get a feel for what is going on. We need a central data warehouse and we need to give them 'dashboards' so they know how they are performing and how they are performing in relation to other stores, which implies good inter-store communications," Slabbert says. "We will be spending quite a lot of effort around BI and communications."
Logistics is another area Slabbert is watching. "We've always been quite good in the supply process once the order has been placed. It is the process before that: identifying suppliers, setting quality standards, testing, communicating with suppliers that we want to automate."
Speeding up
Logistics management currently revolves around spreadsheets, bits of paper and e-mail. "I want to put down a system to automate that and make the process transparent, including a proper workflow programme. This is an area where we can still take weeks out of our process and reduce risk."
Slabbert says a number of retailers are spending more on IT. "There is quite an appetite for ERP [enterprise resource planning] and moving away from home-grown solutions to deploy systems that give management control."
Edcon, he adds, previously used "fairly customised ERP systems". Some will be replaced by more standard products, "but we also sit with a legacy of Cobol and such systems in financial services, and we'd like to see SOA take these systems into the new world so that we don't have to replace, and you can use them as services to the rest of the system."
Slabbert expects service-oriented architecture to give Edcon the flexibility to buy products from different vendors, while allowing it to keep exploiting legacy systems.
"Edcon has seen significant benefits out of systems investments and there is quite an appetite to exploit those further and look for business opportunities to improve Edcon," he concludes.
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