Vishal mega mart diwali the hindu festival that lights up is celebrated across India. Friends and family exchange gifts to wish good fortune for the new year. India’s stores are jam-packed with shoppers looking for great deals and high quality products. Some families even save major household purchases for Diwali. Retailers find Diwali to be the busiest season of the year, promising strong revenues and expanding their customer base. Vishal Mega Mart, India’s largest fashion-led supermarket, faced precisely this mix of opportunity, and challenge.
Gagan Sharma, Senior Manager, Vishal Mega Mart says We are a rapidly growing company. We run a fashion site with many in-house brands. In addition, we have over 190 brick and mortar stores across India. We also launch 25 new stores every year. Our customer reach has been significantly expanded in this era of growing prosperity. But, we also have to satisfy increased demand, especially during Diwali.
“Retail, online or in-store, generates huge amounts of data. Sales reports and supply chain inventories are just a few. Our data has grown from 3.3TB to 9.5TB over a four-year span. As we expanded our business, we found that our IT systems did not perform at their optimal levels. Our supply chain data was slow to process, which led to delayed deliveries leading up to the festival season. This resulted in our stores running out of stock much earlier than anticipated, which affected our sales potential and negatively impacted the customer experience.
Transformation story
Supercharging Supply Chain Management
Gagan Sharma says Our systems were not able to handle the amount of data we were producing as our business expanded. This led to us looking for better performing hardware and higher availability. After looking at a variety of hardware we settled on IBM Power Systems.
Vishal Mega Mart’s IT department worked closely with IBM Systems Lab Services for the migration of the company’s ERP system to the IBM Power Systems servers, and IBM Stanwize V7000 storage. Three IBM Power System E870 server were deployed to support the SAP HANA database. An IBM Power System S824 server was also used. The IBM Power System S822 servers were supported by three IBM Power System S822 servers. A single IBM Power System S822L server was used to support other databases. Vishal Mega Mart used IBM PowerVM virtualization to create a dedicated partition (LPAR) for SAP HANA and a pool shared resources for other databases.
Vishal Mega Mart uses IBM Power Systems servers for its core ERP system. They provide flexibility, reliability, ease of management, and the ability to support it even during high customer demand periods. Vishal Megamar now uses IBM Power Systems to support its core SAP Business Suite, SAP Business Warehouse, SAP Business Warehouse, SAP Enterprise Portal and SAP Process Integration.
“We chose IBM to work for two reasons. Gagan Sharma explains that IBM was a well-respected global business and we could trust them to do a great job. Second, the system had to be compatible with our SAP ERP software. The Storwize V7000 system also provides near real-time data compression. This allows us to manage our large data store easily.
The team chose to migrate from SAP ERP powered by SAP HANA (r) after the IBM hardware was implemented. The new application runs on SAP HANA based on IBM Power Systems architecture, and the SAP Enterprise Server for SAP Applications operating systems.
“Selecting SAP HANA was an easy choice for Vishal mega Mart states Manuhaar Arwalla, the former General Manager of IT, and project leader at Vishal mega Mart. “Having used SAP ERP to manage our supply chain and financial reports for a number years, we were familiar with the high-quality software offered by SAP. SAP HANA’s columnar-in-memory database was a key feature that allowed us to speed up our reporting, supply chains management, and billing.
“We knew with such an increase in our technical capabilities that we would be capable of rapidly transform our company and become more future-ready. We expected that SAP ERP powered SAP HANA and IBM Power Systems would help us attract new customers. Additionally, we could spend more time refining our stores’ look and feel and then channel our energy into creating a mobile ecommerce application, our next step in a truly digital revolution.
The representatives from IBM Systems Lab Services proved to be a superior choice during the implementation process. They displayed a level of expertise that was unimaginable and exhibited a great deal of diligence. Additionally, the migration was made very easy by IBM’s detailed knowledge of how to connect its systems to SAP software. We managed to move the majority of our SAP ERP modules to this SAP HANA version from our old database in just 48 hours.
Stories about the Results
Digital Transformation How to illuminate the path
Vishal Mega Mart has now been able to meet the demand spikes by harnessing the power and flexibility of SAP HANA for IBM Power Systems. Vishal Mega Mart is prepared for Diwali, and has the ability to expand its operations and improve customer experience by making sure that all stores are stocked.
Gagan Sharma says: “The greatest improvement is a significant boost in processing capacity. By migrating from IBM Power Systems to SAP HANA, we saw a 50% improvement in performance. Because transactions and batch processing are much faster, we can now handle much higher peak or standard volumes.
We can order more quickly when we use our sales analysis to identify the stock replenishment requirements of our suppliers. This helps us keep our shelves stocked. Our shelves are always full during busy periods. This encourages customers to come into our stores because they know they can always get a good Diwali deal even at peak times.
“Our financial reporting runs much faster, which improves our agility by giving the information we need more quickly to make key purchasing decisions. This version of SAP HANA enables us to transform transactional data into actionable insights. We can see when and where to buy the most in-demand clothes, cookware, groceries, and other items during Diwali.
“We have also been able make efficiency savings. We have reduced the size of our data centers and our power consumption by 68%. Not only have we saved energy, but also our OPEX has been reduced significantly. We were able reduce the cost to hire additional staff during festival times by eliminating the need for a seasonal team. These operational savings are used to improve the quality of our products, and develop our online presence.
Gagan Sharma concluded: “Working together with IBM to implement SAP HANA onto IBM Power Systems, it is now possible to direct more resources to increase our presence throughout India and reach our core objective of developing high-quality goods at affordable costs. This is how Vishal Mega Mart’s future growth can be achieved by implementing SAP HANA using IBM Power Systems.
“Looking ahead, our goal is to open more brick and mortar stores and create a mobile application to help customers increase their online trading. Our current focus is to improve the look and feel in our physical stores. However, we will soon embrace mobile e-commerce technology to make our customers’ shopping experience even more enjoyable. With SAP HANA’s dynamic functionality, backed by the powerful IBM hardware, it is easy to move into the future of retail.
Vishal Mega Mart
Vishal Mega Mart India is India’s biggest fashion-led hypermarket chain. The company has over 192 stores, and an area of trading that exceeds 3 million square feet. This includes 110 Indian cities. The company sells fashion, general merchandise, groceries, personal care products and is destined for millions in India.
