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The Rs. 100 crore investment for IT infrastructure revamp will be mainly in the areas of hardware, software, business connectivity infrastructure such as virtual private network, video conferencing and skilled IT manpower.

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) made its debut in India, when Wipro launched an RFID-enabled shop on its Bangalore campus in July, but now Pantaloon Retail will be the first Indian retail chain to experiment with RFID.

The pilot project (worth Rs. 30 lakh) is being implemented at Pantaloon Retail's central warehouse in Tarapur, near Mumbai. It will be limited to just 1,000 tags being attached to a few selected product lines mainly from its in-house textile mills.

A basic RFID system consists of a tag or antennae, which can be attached to any product, and transceivers or decoders can then track the products. Therefore, whenever a customer buys a product, the retailer can track its movement - and even generate a bill automatically, without the customer going to the cash counter. However, Pantaloon is implementing RFID technology mainly for managing its supply chain - from vendors to warehouse and then to the shop floor - with carton level tagging.

In India, each tag costs Rs. 6 and with the chain stocking around 3 lakh SKUs, the entire spend is quite mind-boggling.

Supply Chain Management

PRIL has been awarded the ISO 9001:2000 Quality certificate by Det Norske Veritas, one of the world's leading quality certifiers, for its Supply Chain & Logistics function. Pantaloon Retail is the first company in the organized retail sector in India to win an accredited ISO Certificate exclusively for its Supply Chain & Logistics function.

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* Contributed by -
Manasi Panigrahi,
Pursuing MBA, Batch of 2006,
ICFAI Business School, Hyderabad.