As we sit down to talk, Ken Murphy is excited that the Christmas delivery slots that they had just opened up in the UK were being lapped up by customers. Tesco , the UK’s largest retailer and which Ken leads as CEO, releases about 1.2 million online slots for Christmas. Customers can pick a slot, and start filling up their cart. And on that particular date and time before Christmas, their orders will be delivered home.
“It’s just half-past-seven in the UK, and we’ve already given away 210,000 slots,” he says.
Ken then goes on to tell us that it’s Tesco’s team in India that monitors the availability of slots, and makes sure the system is stable, that there are no problems in pro cessing customers through the website. “So they perform a really critical function. When you see a spike like that in activity, it can take your website down,” he says.
But that’s just a tiny part of the extraordinary amount of work that Tesco’s Bengaluru centre – set up in 2003, one of the oldest GCCs in India – today does for the £66-billion supermarket chain. “Tesco Business Solutions (TBS) is like our right arm,” Ken says of the 5,000-strong centre.
Sumit Mitra, who leads TBS, says every Tesco store in the world is designed from here – the architecture, refits, look & feel, what goes where, signages. “There are no architects anywhere else in Tesco. They are even doing the analytics to understand where we should be opening a store. They do the due diligence, the bill of materials, and then it gets project managed and delivered from the UK,” he says.
The centre here does end-toend maintenance of all products in the stores. All the 312,000 fridg es are monitored from here. Based on IoT, teams here manage the temperatures of the fridges. If they think a fridge door is open, they alert the particular store.
Teams here do all the asset valuations, understanding how much each property is worth, managing leases, negotiating with landlords. They do energy management, understanding how much energy is being consumed by each store, why a particular store might be consuming more energy than another similar store. They manage supplier due diligence, induction of suppliers, setting them up, managing millions of promotions, labelling, and pricing.
They even manage £44 billion of commercial income. “It’s the trade funding we receive for promotions or for displays or for product placements,” says Ken. It’s really easy to lose money in retail, he says, if you don’t have a very good end-to-end process for agreements on promotions, executing the promotions and then collecting the money, because a lot of the promotions would be con tingent on volume sold, etc. “The team in Bengaluru is able to effectively manage this entire process, which is really helpful in terms of margin management,” he says.
Most finance processes are done out of here. £5.8 billion of payroll – for all of Tesco’s 360,000 people – is managed from here. The payment of all of those who come in temporarily, like students or during peak seasons, is handled here. Sumit says this is hugely complex, given the diversity of working arrangements that need to be tracked and accurately paid.
Recruitment for head office and for technology – including sourcing CVs, background verification – are done here. “Now we’re beginning to even do store recruitment from here,” Sumit says.
Data analytics is a key part of a lot of the work. The team here built a tool that can track anything a customer has said across contact centres, stores, websites, social media, etc. “We bring all the information in and then we are able to drill down to talk about, say, the product quality, compare with our competitors, and focus on the region where the issues are, who our supplier is in that area, how do we make that product better,” says Sumit.
AI is also transforming operations. A team of 22 used to take 7-8 months to analyse the 290,000 product returns a year, understand affected suppliers, and talk to them. Now, Sumit says, they have two people, and they just talk to suppliers because all the other work is done by AI.
“It’s just half-past-seven in the UK, and we’ve already given away 210,000 slots,” he says.
Ken then goes on to tell us that it’s Tesco’s team in India that monitors the availability of slots, and makes sure the system is stable, that there are no problems in pro cessing customers through the website. “So they perform a really critical function. When you see a spike like that in activity, it can take your website down,” he says.
But that’s just a tiny part of the extraordinary amount of work that Tesco’s Bengaluru centre – set up in 2003, one of the oldest GCCs in India – today does for the £66-billion supermarket chain. “Tesco Business Solutions (TBS) is like our right arm,” Ken says of the 5,000-strong centre.
Sumit Mitra, who leads TBS, says every Tesco store in the world is designed from here – the architecture, refits, look & feel, what goes where, signages. “There are no architects anywhere else in Tesco. They are even doing the analytics to understand where we should be opening a store. They do the due diligence, the bill of materials, and then it gets project managed and delivered from the UK,” he says.
The centre here does end-toend maintenance of all products in the stores. All the 312,000 fridg es are monitored from here. Based on IoT, teams here manage the temperatures of the fridges. If they think a fridge door is open, they alert the particular store.
Teams here do all the asset valuations, understanding how much each property is worth, managing leases, negotiating with landlords. They do energy management, understanding how much energy is being consumed by each store, why a particular store might be consuming more energy than another similar store. They manage supplier due diligence, induction of suppliers, setting them up, managing millions of promotions, labelling, and pricing.
They even manage £44 billion of commercial income. “It’s the trade funding we receive for promotions or for displays or for product placements,” says Ken. It’s really easy to lose money in retail, he says, if you don’t have a very good end-to-end process for agreements on promotions, executing the promotions and then collecting the money, because a lot of the promotions would be con tingent on volume sold, etc. “The team in Bengaluru is able to effectively manage this entire process, which is really helpful in terms of margin management,” he says.
Most finance processes are done out of here. £5.8 billion of payroll – for all of Tesco’s 360,000 people – is managed from here. The payment of all of those who come in temporarily, like students or during peak seasons, is handled here. Sumit says this is hugely complex, given the diversity of working arrangements that need to be tracked and accurately paid.
Recruitment for head office and for technology – including sourcing CVs, background verification – are done here. “Now we’re beginning to even do store recruitment from here,” Sumit says.
Data analytics is a key part of a lot of the work. The team here built a tool that can track anything a customer has said across contact centres, stores, websites, social media, etc. “We bring all the information in and then we are able to drill down to talk about, say, the product quality, compare with our competitors, and focus on the region where the issues are, who our supplier is in that area, how do we make that product better,” says Sumit.
AI is also transforming operations. A team of 22 used to take 7-8 months to analyse the 290,000 product returns a year, understand affected suppliers, and talk to them. Now, Sumit says, they have two people, and they just talk to suppliers because all the other work is done by AI.
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