Tesco to increase staff in IT, BPO units to 770

Tesco, £33.5 billion Britian-based retail chain on Thursday announced plans to staff up their captive IT and BPO centre here to 770 by year-end. The centre currently employs 192, with 100 dedicated to IT services alone.

In the long run Tesco said headcount across IT and BPO verticals will be in the 60:40 ratio. In the process, Tesco's UK based IT wing will cut workforce by a similar number.

After the formal inauguration of their centre named Hindustan Service Centre by Karnataka Industries Minister P G R Sindhia, Philip Clarke, Tesco's International IT Director said, the Indian centre will primarily serve the United Kingdom and Asian operations.

European stores will be catered to by the shared centre at Prague, Czech Republic and the remnants of the UK centre. In Asia, Tesco operates in Thailand, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, China and Japan.

The Bangalore centre will work on the 'Tesco in a box' concept which attempts to integrate Retek's retail ERP, Oracle's financial ERP, People Soft's human resource ERP and several custom built applications into one.

Once customised, the Bangalore centre will roll it out in Tesco's new markets China, Japan and Turkey and extend support services. Besides this, it will work on data warehousing and intregrating the group's numerous legacy services.

The centre's BPO division is working on financial and payroll processing and suppliers and corporate requests maintenance.

Tesco plans to migrate management controlling and financial reporting and stores help desk functions to India soon. Customer interfaces and queries could also be moved to India, but Tesco ruled out migrating customer problem solving functions.

Despite the growth of the captive centre, Meena Ganesh, who heads the Hindustan Service Centre, and Philip Clarke said associations with Xansa, Infosys, Wipro and TCS will continue, though on a reduced level. For instance retail payroll systems which were being handled by associates, will now be shared with the captive centre.

Clarke said that the next three to four years will determine the type of associates that Tesco will still need.

He added, that trade unions in UK have been quite co-operative to the offshoring move. "For our part, we have been creating 10,000 retail jobs annually for the past three years to keep them satisfied."

He said, India was chosen for its manpower and the 5.5 hour time differential over UK and about three hour advantage over East Asian nations. Bangalore too was zeroed in after a nationwide survey.

Tesco is now one of the top three retailers in the world, with 2318 stores and 3.26 lakh employees spread across 13 countries.