Offshore Development Center (ODC) Case Study

Streamlining the Retail Chain
Developing a data warehousing and software project management solution for a retail giant

Case Summary

A US-based retail chain wanted to develop a new system that would efficiently manage their data collection process and eliminate the inefficiency of their existing system.

Customer

With over a thousand retail stores, including hundreds of licensed locations across several states, the customer is a leading retail and food distribution company, and ranks amongst the top 12 food retailers in the US. These outlets in turn cater to over 1,100 stores that include regional and national chain supermarkets, corporate-owned and licensed retail locations, mass merchandisers and 'e-tailers'.

The Challenge

The client undertook an initiative to streamline existing operations. The retail chain's category managers wanted to develop a system that would effectively assemble and manage data from various sources, analyze it, and monitor and measure performance. Earlier, the client had developed a data warehousing application, but the onsite time and material model was proving to be rather expensive besides laboring under cost and time overruns.

The Solution

Based on its vast domain expertise and proven technology skills in software project management and data warehousing solutions, Tata Infotech proposed an ODC as a solution, which would act as a virtual extension of the client's own development environment, and give them the added control and comfort that comes with having an onsite team.

Benefits to the Client

Over a two-year long project relationship with Tata Infotech, the retail giant employed over 45 man-years of service on projects that were concurrently executed from the ODC.

The overall elapsed time was consistently reduced by about 20-30 per cent, compared with the onsite time and material model. The customer had the option of leveraging deployable resource pool in the ODC and ramping it up whenever required. For the projects executed from the ODC, Tata Infotech was able to maintain a ratio of 80:20 for offshore to onsite work on projects, and generated about 30-40 per cent cost savings.

In addition, the client was able to confidently undertake projects even in areas where they did not have in-house technical skill sets. Tata Infotech successfully complemented the existing IT staff of the client by providing qualified human resources in the required areas.