Industry
Retail
Omnichannel CX and Intelligent Innovation – The Future of Retail
Highlights
- Indian retailer Trent wanted to modernize their ERP system with SAP S/4HANA to streamline operations, improve scalability, and support business expansion. .
- TCS enabled a seamless brownfield SAP S/4HANA conversion with minimal downtime, simplifying Trent’s data architecture and ensuring integrated operations in finance and retail.
- The transformation improved performance, enabled real-time analytics, and reduced operational costs, helping Trent deliver an agile and modern shopping experience.
On this page
Overview
Trent, a fast-growing Indian retailer operating Westside, Zudio, and Star Bazaar stores, is known for offering quality, value, and seamless in-store experience.
Trent was established in 1998 as a part of the Tata group. Star Bazaar, the grocery retail under Trent is one of India’s largest and fastest-growing retail chains, while Westside and Zudio are well-known clothing stores. Trent has over 1,000 stores across more than 242 cities in India and two stores in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Trent wanted to build a scalable, integrated digital foundation to support its retail ambitions and strengthen its market position given the growing customer demand and its rapidly expanding operational footprint. The goal was to streamline operations, improve speed and accuracy, and enable faster decisions as the company scaled.
Trent started a brownfield conversion journey for their digital transformation. They wanted an omni-business set-up to elevate the brand promise and experience. This required an end-to-end solution that could offer real-time insights. Additionally, as a vertically integrated organization, Trent needed a solution to ensure optimal performance of their entire value chain, from suppliers to retail locations.
Legacy challenges
Trent's legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, running on a two-decade-old platform, struggled to handle the high volume of transactions, especially during the busy festival season.
This led to system overloads, limiting concurrent users, which reduced overall efficiency. Legacy systems also prevented innovation and digital transformation as the retailer could not leverage new technologies.
A critical challenge was the migration of finance data from the old system to SAP S/4HANA without business disruption, particularly because it involved handling data since 2005 for 12 active company codes. Trent needed to move quickly to a modern, high-performing platform to keep up with business growth, improve retail analytics and planning, enhance demand forecasting, and maximize the effectiveness of promotions and assortments. The old system was no longer sustainable in view of the expanding business needs.
Trent envisioned a robust, scalable ERP backbone to improve decision-making, streamline finance, and enable agile store operations.
Trent's digital transformation for agility
Modern ERP
TCS and SAP collaborated with Trent to harness the power of SAP S/4HANA 2022.
The migration involved a meticulous cutover plan aligned with SAP’s standard system conversion approach.
A key part of the solution involved converting the business partner data, including data for suppliers, customers, and store details, ahead of the scheduled production downtime. TCS completed this task in just three hours, ensuring uninterrupted operations. In addition, TCS ensured compatibility by upgrading the database, resolving inconsistencies ahead of the cutover, and simplifying the data model. Multiple technical solutions were implemented to streamline finance data migration.
The new structure removed redundancies and enabled better integration with SAP and non-SAP systems. TCS’ expertise ensured a seamless transition, creating a unified, cloud-based ERP foundation that supports Trent’s expanding retail footprint.
Delivering agility
The ERP transformation significantly enhanced performance across Trent’s business functions.
The project ensured faster processing, real-time financial reporting, and increased system stability for Trent. In addition, it improved user concurrency and retail analytics. With better visibility and simplified architecture, Trent can now run complex promotions, manage dynamic pricing, and analyze cross-channel data in real-time.
Better integration of supply chain operations and store systems boosted collaboration and operational efficiency. Store operations became more efficient through intuitive apps. Additionally, financial operations were optimized by consolidating postings into a single source of truth, reducing system errors and improving monthly and quarterly closures. With a smaller data footprint, robust performance, and enhanced scalability, Trent is well-positioned to manage its expanding operations and meet evolving market demands.
This successful transformation, led by TCS and powered by SAP S/4HANA, has enabled Trent to operate with greater efficiency and agility and continue delivering exceptional service and quality to their customers, ensuring they remain a leader in the retail industry.
Venkatesalu P
Managing Director, Trent
In all of these transformations, TCS has been integral to the conversation right from the very start. Without TCS's involvement we would not have had the confidence to pursue such strategic shifts at speed and without those transformations we would have never realized many of the business objectives that we sought to land.”
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